90 TOBACCO AND ITS EFFECTS. 



doned for dwelling upon it a little, the more especially as 

 the records of our insane asylums point clearly to some 

 cause for the rapid increase of brain and neurotic troubles. 

 Should this cause prove to be the abuse, to say nothing of 

 the use of tobacco, we may yet find that the germs of 

 premature decay, thus widely spread over the land, are 

 more dangerous than those other germs of whose deadly 

 powers we have of late years heard not a little. 



It is a fact within the experience of every one, that a 

 scar upon the body remains practically indelible through 

 life ; that it can neither be washed out nor worn out ; that 

 in spite of all the changes incident to growth and waste 

 and repair, notwithstanding the continual flux of particles, 

 it is constantly and accurately reproduced. A child is 

 born, and meets, it may be in years of infancy, with some 

 accidental injury which causes destruction of tissue and a 

 consequent scar; that scar remains to mark the site of 

 the injury through the whole existence of the individual, 

 goes with him into his coffin, and remains to prove his 

 physical identity until the body decays. But not one 

 single particle, of all the many particles that went to make 

 up the body of the child at the time the injury was 

 received, was buried with the body of the man when at 

 last he died. Something reproduced that scar, however, 

 as the body grew, and as the system threw off particle 

 after particle, day by day and hour by hour, until the 

 renewal was completed, then only to be recommenced ; 

 and that something which constituted the identity of the 

 man was injured by the accident which produced the scar- 

 ring. Here is a mysterious fact, but none the less 

 incontrovertible, right before every one of us each day ; 

 and what is true of the comparatively coarse outer 



