INFLUENCE ON THE HUMAN SYSTEM. 127 



mended to Charles IX, , her son, for his chronic 

 headaches. Its efficacy consists in irritating the 

 pituitary membrane, and thus producing and 

 augmenting the secretion of mucus. The poet 

 Horace would have been much obliged to the 

 inventor had he been contemporaneous, for he 

 states that he would be " particularly well, were 

 it not for a troublesome rheum" — " prsecipue 

 sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est." Indeed 

 snuif-taking was evidently an original medical 

 prescription, and as such I must leave it entirely 

 to the doctors. Vix ea nostra voco. I grudge a 

 cigar to the man who " snuffs." The olfactory 

 cannot reasonably object to an ethereal vapour, 

 but to bury it alive in dust, to slake it with a 

 filthy liquor, perhaps compounded of sal-am- 

 moniac, yellow ochre, red lead, and other infernal 

 concoctions, is too hard to bear — even for a nerve 

 of the nose, condemned as it is, without the 

 possibility of defence spontaneous, to smell all 

 manner of rats, in all manner of shapes incidental 

 to the economy of man and universal nature. 



And the sneezing which it produces may 

 cause the rupture of an aneurism, a cerebral 



