74 ST NICOTINE 



It is also gratifying to learn that our forefathers, in 

 whose wisdom all right-minded people, of course, fondly 

 believe, were not wholly wrong in their estimate of the 

 manifold virtues of their beloved herb. With the largeness 

 of faith which belongs equally to the infancy of research 

 and the springtime of life, they believed with the implicit 

 faith of childhood in its all-healing powers. And the 

 learned in the secrets of Nature proclaimed to suffering 

 humanity that out of the heart of the New World had come 

 a remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. But if facts 

 grew too strong for faith to grapple with, and overthrew their 

 Dagon, this one consolation remains to testify to their just 

 appreciation of the weed, namely, that it can, and does, 

 destroy contagious germs. 



Early in the seventeenth century, physicians at home and 

 abroad had observed a connection between the use of 

 tobacco and freedom from the dread pestilence which at 

 times swept over the land. Doctors Gardiner and Lewis, 

 Thorius and Diemerbroeck, Hoffman and Willis have left 

 records of their experience of cases where tobacco proved 

 to be efficacious, administered either in fume or liquor, 

 lotions or unguents. No doubt their treatment was some- 

 what crude, and their concoctions (marvels of simplicity) 

 were not always successful, and, needless to say, that 

 modern therapeutics takes no account of their remedies. 

 But their discovery that tobacco was destructive of insect 

 life on animals as well as on vegetables, that it cleansed old 

 wounds and sores and suffered them to heal ' comfortably,' 

 surely redeems them from a multidude of sins committed in 

 the name of tobacco. 



Glancing back to the early records of its advent in 

 Europe we come upon Licbault in 1570 discoursing 

 pleasantly on the marvellous virtues of the herb, and learn 



