PHYSICAL AND INTELLECTUAL VIEW. 93 



An authentic account is given of the child of an 

 inveterate smoker, a mere infant, whose stomach 

 rejected food, and who was pining away for lack 

 of nourishment. To quiet it, the father held a 

 cigar between its lips. The babe greedily sucked 

 it, and by means of the stimulus was able to take 

 food. But this tobacco, for which it inherited so 

 unnatural a craving, proved a necessity. It could 

 not get on without it. I hardly need add that 

 under its influence the child gradually became 

 dwarfed and idiotic. " The fathers have eaten sour 

 grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." 

 Are we doomed, in the future, to have a race of 

 idiots ? 



One of our public journals gives the account of 

 a four-year-old who inherited the narcotic appe- 

 tite, cigars being " necessarily given from infancy 

 to keep him quiet." This continued, till he came 

 to smoke twenty stoga cigars a day, and then cry 

 for more. Spinal disease setting in, he was taken 

 to a surgical institute. When the doctors took 

 away his cigars, " the child kicked and howled 

 like a maniac." 



A physician relates the case of a smoker whose 

 children " were cursed from their birth. His idi- 

 otic boy would scoop up the loathsome ashes 

 scraped from his father's pipe and eat them with 

 avidity ! " 



Surely Dr. Pidduck is justified in his assertion 

 in The Lancet of 1856, that " in no instance is the 

 sin of the father more strikingly visited upon his 



