96 tobacco: its use and abuse. 



swarm in their tents, by poisoning their blood with to. 

 baeco, whilst the wine and spirit-drinking Europeans 

 are attacked without mercy. What is so fatal to insect 

 life, cannot be otherwise than most formidable to the life 

 of persons whose blood is thus poisoned. If the evil 

 ended with the individual who, by the indulgence of a 

 pernicious custom, injures his own health, and impairs 

 his faculties of mind and body, he might be left to his 

 enjoyments — his ^Fools' Paradise^ — unmolested. This, 

 however, is not the case : in no instance is the sin of the 

 father more strikingly visited upon his children, than 

 the sin of tobacco smoking. The enervation, the hypo- 

 chondriasis, the hysteria, the insanity, the dwarfish de- 

 formities, the consumption, the sufiering lives and early 

 deaths ot the children of inveterate smokers, bear ample 

 testimony to the feebleness and unsoundness of the con- 

 stitution transmitted by this pernicious habit. 



^' How is it, then, that the Eastern nations have not, 

 ere this, become exterminated by a practice which is 

 almost universal ? The reply is, that by early marriage, 

 before the habit is fully formed, or its injurious efi'ects 

 decidedly developed, the evil to the offspring is pre- 

 vented; but in this country, where smoking is com- 

 menced early, and marriage is contracted late in life, 

 the evil is entailed in full force upon the offspring. 

 Adulterations of all kinds are bad enough, but the 

 adulteration by a narcotic — poisoning the life at its 

 source, the breath; and, in its course, the blood — is 

 worse than all. By these adulterations, the health of 

 the community is injured; by this, a man injures his 

 own health and that of his children. Ought not this 



