TOBACCO AND ITS EFFECTS. 9 1 



integuments of skin and muscle, is also true of the mar- 

 vellously delicate tissues that go to make up brain and 

 nervous system. Our great psychologists seem tending 

 toward the conclusion, which some at least among them 

 have fully adopted, that the characteristics, mental and 

 physical, which distinguish whole families, in some cases 

 whole tribes and nations, are attributable to alterations of 

 tissue, which partake very much of the nature of the altera- 

 tion produced by an injury which we call a scar, and 

 which, when affecting the deHcate nervous and cerebral 

 tissues, may be transmitted from one generation to another. 

 "The fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's 

 teeth are set on edge." 



Men cannot live without acquiring habits; and these 

 habits, which react on bodily conformation to a greater or 

 less extent, do the same thing, it is highly probable, on 

 the mind. Who can doubt, that has ever hstened to an 

 old man telling for the hundredth time some story of his 

 younger days, that the habit of telling has induced some 

 permanent effect on his brain-tissue — that the mind is 

 moving, as it were, in a groove ? And who can doubt that 

 habit, whether good or bad, acts upon every one much 

 in the same way, producing grooves which are made deep 

 and yet deeper by every repetition of the habitual action ; 

 which, in its turn, is thus rendered more and more easy, 

 until it at last becomes automatic, instinctive, practically 

 a part of the organization of the individual, ready to be 

 transmitted to his offspring, and through them, it may be 

 in an intensified form, to distant generations ? 



Thus when the appetite for tobacco is fully established — 

 as it has been, in instances almost innumerable, when an 

 individual has come so fully under its influence that to 



