92 TOBACCO AND ITS EFFECTS. 



forego its indulgence is an impossibility — there can be little 

 room for doubt that some change has been brought about 

 in his organization, that may be, and very possibly often is, 

 transmitted to his children. It would, perhaps, be too 

 much to say that a child of the second generation will 

 come into the world with an appetite for tobacco fully 

 formed ; but it seems exceedingly probable that, with this 

 or any similar habit firmly fixed in the father, a modifica- 

 tion of the system has been brought about, which may be 

 transmitted in a less decided degree to the child, for whom 

 the formation of the habit or the acquisition of the appe- 

 tite is thus rendered easier — in whom perhaps its devel- 

 opment, at a comparatively early age, may be looked for 

 with great confidence ; and it is evident that but a few 

 repetitions of this process, in successive generations, are 

 needed to produce a family or a tribe, or even a whole 

 race, in whom the habit shall be innate, and shall appear 

 among the earhest manifestations of liking or disliking. 

 That this is not a mere theory — that, so far from such 

 being the case, it is an estabhshed fact — is proven 

 by the testimony of travellers in East India, and among 

 those races of Central and South America, with whose 

 ancestors the use of tobacco probably first originated ; and 

 where we are told that children, yet unable to walk, are to 

 be seen carried at the mother's back, papoose-fashion, or 

 astride of her hip, puffing at a cigarette, identical in kind 

 with that which the mother herself is enjoying, and seem- 

 ingly finding it more of a necessity than many things 

 which our own children reckon among the essentials of 

 existence ! Do we desire to see any such state of things 

 in our own country? It is not enough to say that such 

 instances are to be met with only among barbarians ; we 



