964 THE AMERICAN FARMER. 



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inflammation of the throat and tonsils, is exceedingly common. Graver evils, such as par 

 alysis, mental decline, and loss of sight from wasting away of the optic nerve, have been 

 charged to excessive use of tobacco; but when we see the enormous number of persons who 

 indulge heavily in the weed, and the comparatively rare occurrence of the affections in ques 

 tion, where there is not some other obvious and valid sense for the same, the claim that 

 tobacco is to blame for the disease must be received with caution.&quot; 



Cigarette smoking has become very common with young men within a few years, and 

 this indulgence is regarded by many as less harmful than the use of cigars or a pipe. An 

 eminent London physician expresses the following: &quot; Scarcely less injurious, in a subtle 

 and generally unrecognized way, than the habit of taking nips of alcohol between meals, 

 is the growing practice of smoking cigarettes incessantly. It is against the habit of smoking 

 cigarettes in large quantities, with the belief that these miniature doses of nicotine are innocu 

 ous, that we desire to enter a protest. The truth is that perhaps owing to the way the tobacco 

 leaf is shredded, coupled with the fact that it is brought into more direct relation with the 

 mouth and air-passages than when it is smoked in a pipe or cigar, the effects produced on the 

 nervous system by a free consumption of cigarettes are more marked and characteristic than 

 those recognizable after recourse to other methods of smoking. A pulse-tracing made after 

 the subject has smoked say a dozen cigarettes will, as a rule, be flatter and more indicative 

 of depression than one taken after the smoking of cigars. It is no uncommon practice for 

 young men who smoke cigarettes habitually to consume from eight to twelve in an hour, 

 and to keep this up for four or five hours daily. The total quantity of tobacco consumed 

 may not seem large, but beyond question the volume of smoke to which the breath organs of 

 the smoker are exposed, and the characteristics of that smoke as regards the proportion of 

 nicotine introduced into the system, combine to place the organism very fully under the 

 influence of the tobacco. A considerable number of cases have been brought under our 

 notice during the last few months in which youths and young men who have not yet com 

 pleted the full term of physical development have had their health seriously impaired by the 

 practice of almost incessantly smoking cigarettes. It is well that the facts should be known, 

 as the impression evidently prevails that any number of these little whiffs must needs be 

 perfectly innocuous, whereas they often do infinite harm.&quot; 



Boys On the Farm. The grave question as to why so many young men from the 

 country leave the farm for other occupations, and how to check the evil, is one of great inter 

 est to farmers households and society generally throughout the country. Comparatively 

 few farmers boys, especially in New England and the Middle States, at the present time fol 

 low the occupation of their fathers, but there is rather a regular stampede of young men 

 from the country to the cities and larger towns, and the places that should be supplied by 

 them as intelligent and enterprising citizens are in a majority of cases filled with the lower 

 type of the foreign element, so that many of our country towns formerly noted for thrift, 

 enterprise, and the intelligence and refinement of their population, have become sadly deterio 

 rated within the last ten or twenty years, while the city is overcrowded, and numerous 

 applicants can be found for every vacancy that occurs, even when the salary is scarcely suffi 

 cient to defray the expenses of the board, lodging, and clothing of the applicant. This is a 

 condition of things which does not augur well for the future welfare of our country, and 

 ought not to exist. Farming can and should be made profitable ; it can and should, as an occu 

 pation, be made attractive, and because it has not generally been made such is the principal 

 cause for the evil in question. Another reason is because the farmers boys do not fully 

 understand the relation existing between the city and country; they hear of large salaries 

 being paid the city clerk, and do not realize the great difference between the living expenses 

 of the two localities, and that a man in the city is much more closeiy occupied and confined 

 with his business than the farmer could possibly be. They are also led to believe that 

 farming is not as honorable an occupation as some others. The reason for much of this false 

 prejudice against farm life is that farming has not been conducted in the proper manner 

 and its highest possibilities attained. If farmers wish their sons to regard farming as hon 

 orable, profitable, and attractive they should make it such, and by so doing there would need 

 be no other inducement to require their children to respect and follow it. Professor H. E. 

 Alvord very justly says in this connection: &quot;The fathers and mothers who are at the heads 

 of the farm homes of America must bear in mind that they are laying the foundations, in 

 body and in character, not only of their successors in their own calling, but of the future 

 leaders in almost all the walks of life. The great responsibility thus resting upon them can 

 not be too forcibly expressed or too keenly appreciated. 



