ANTI-TOBACCO. 1 9 



for January, 1861, says : " We see with satisfaction that the 

 Minister of Pubhc Instruction of France has issued a 

 circular, addressed to the directors of colleges and 

 schools, forbidding the use of tobacco and cigars to 

 students." 



Physiological experiments have shown (Ed. Smith, 

 British Association, 1864, &c.) that smoking makes the 

 heart beat more rapidly, from the paralyzing effects of 

 nicotine on minute vessels of the system, which no longer 

 offer their usual resistance to the force-pump of the 

 circulation. Nicotine, as for convenience the poisoning 

 principle of tobacco is called, enters the body by the 

 stomach, the lungs, and by the skin; and its effects are 

 uniform by whatever gate it enters. Dr. Edward Smith 

 found that when his pulse was 74 per minute before 

 smoking, it rose, after smoking eleven minutes, to 112. 

 ^^ The effect produced by tobacco on the heart is caused by 

 its paralyzing effect on the minute vessels of the capilla- 

 ries. These being relaxed can no longer offer effectual 

 resistance ; and the heart, freed from this control, in- 

 creases the rapidity of its strokes. This increase of the 

 heart's action results pardy also from the paralyzing effect 

 of the drug upon the pneumogastric nerve, which supplies 

 the stomach and lungs with neive power. 



Dr. Drysdale (" Tobacco, and the Diseases it pro- 

 duces ") says: ^'The influence of tobacco upon the 

 eyesight is well known. One of the symptoms produced 

 in acute poisoning by tobacco is blindness ; and chronic 

 poisoning gives rise to similar symptoms. Mackenzie, of 

 Glasgow, first noticed that male patients affected with one 

 species of amaurosis were mostly great lovers of tobacco 

 in some form. 



