72 TOBACCO. 



hypochondria and insomnia, and sometimes, after 

 the victim has retired, frightful shocks, likened to 

 a discharge of electricity. Impregnate fresh-drawn 

 blood with nicotine, and at once it acquires a dark 

 hue, while the microscope shows the red corpus- 

 cles undergoing rapid disintegration," a phenome- 

 non which is styled crenation. 



On this point, another medical man states that, 

 where the tobacco habit has been of long standing, 

 the ratio of degenerated corpuscles to healthy ones 

 is often as one in twenty-five or thirty, and some- 

 times comes to be as one in ten. A wealthy ama- 

 teur who had been selecting a microscope at an 

 optician's, left on the slide a drop of his own blood 

 w T hich he had used as a test. As he was leaving 

 the office with a cigar in his mouth, the professor 

 of microscopy in one of our medical colleges, 

 happening in, glanced at the slide, moving it to and 

 fro, and then made a rapid computation. The 

 optician looked on with surprise, remarking, " that 

 gentleman is one of our best customers, he buys 

 more heavily than half a dozen professors." " And 

 this is a drop of his blood ? " inquired the man of 

 science. The purveyor of lenses assented. " Very 

 well," replied the professor, "tell your best cus- 

 tomer, if you can without impertinence, that unless 

 he stops smoking at once he has not many months 

 to live." But he did not stop. A few weeks 

 later he went to Europe, thinking a sea voyage 

 might recruit his wasted energies. In a few weeks 

 more his death was announced by telegraph from 



