762 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



on is the downright innocency, in itself, of opium smoldng; and that, therefore, 

 so far as we are concerned in its morality, whether judged by a standard based 

 on a deduction from preconceived religious ideas or an induction from national 

 practices, we are as free to introduce opium into China and to raise a revenue 

 from it in India as to export our cotton, iron, and woollen manufactures to 

 France. The habitual eating and drinking of opium are altogether different 

 things from smoking it as a gentle incentive to restorative repose of mind. 

 Opium taken internally is a powerful and dangerous narcotic stimulant, but even so it 

 is no worse in the effects produced by excessive use than alcohol. It is, and has 

 been, immemorially used throughout vast regions of the East. It satisfies a nat- 

 ural human craving for some paregoric stuff or other, "banishing sorrow, wrath- 

 allaying, and causing oblivion of all cares;" while its consumption has been 

 further fostered by the religious ban imposed in Asiatic countries on the use of 

 alcoholic spirits. Alcohol acts with doubly destructive force in tropical climates 

 and with awful rapidity, and its victims are a constant danger to others ; whereas, 

 the sufferers from the abuse of opium are seldom dangerous to others, and are a. 

 nuisance only from hngering so long in a state of harmless dullness on the hands 

 of their relations. Nothing, moreover, is so offensive to respectable Asiatics as 

 the violent excitement caused by wine and ardent spirits ; and opium enables- 

 these dignified persons, who dare not break the ecclesiastical law against alcoholic 

 drinks, nor outrage the social feeling against noisy intoxication, to safely satiate 

 their natural craving for something at once stimulating and soothing. The ill- 

 effects of the habitual use of opium in excess are developed almost exclusively 

 among those who, by some weakness or injury of brain, or by the unhappy cir- 

 cumstances of their lives, are predisposed to over-indulgence. The habit of de- 

 structive excess among them is, in fact, usually to be traced to chronic diarrhoea, 

 chronic cough, chronic fever, and the long religious fasts, alike of Buddhists, 

 Hindoos, and Mussulmans, in which opium is used to allay the pangs of protract- 

 ed hunger. Besides these unfortunates, the weak-brained, the dissipated rich, 

 and the hopelessly poverty-stricken, are the only sufferers. Sound, hale people, 

 in comfortable circumstances, who lead healthy lives, seldom or never suffer from 

 the habitual use of opium, even in quantities that seem to be excessive. 



There are few finer people in the world than those of Goojerat, Kattyawar^ 

 Cutch, and Central India, and they are all addicted to the habitual use of opium. 

 In Rajpootana, high and low, rich and poor, indulge in it to the most alarming 

 excess, measured by the quantity they take, but, as regards the mass of popula- 

 tion, with impunity. These Rajpoots are splendid men, well-formed, handsome,, 

 and of the most chivalrous and romantic temperament. Their custom is to drink 

 the opium in the form of an emulsion called Kasumba. It is prepared and served 

 in a bow like an enormous pap-bowl, from which it is poured into the joined palms 

 of every visitor to drink of it, and the Rajpoots are always taking the paregoric 

 draughts from morning till night. But they are robust and active, constantly in 

 the open air, and, as a rule, suffer no more from their immoderate potations of 

 Kasumba than healthy country-folk in England from sound ale, or Tartars from 



