recently been made an almost simultaneous
onslaught against tobacco-smoking, of which
the English attack is likely to prove all the more
deadly, from being calm, temperate, and judicial
in its argumentation. M. Jolly, member of the
Imperial Academy of Medicine, entertained his
colleagues, last February, with papers which
gave no quarter to the weed. He determined
to make an impression; and he made it: for
half measures and faint blame, in Paris, gain but
few disciples. A plant at once stinking, acrid, and
poisonous; which equally disgusts us by its taste
and its smell; which causes giddiness, nausea,
vomiting, and intoxication in persons who
come in contact with it for the first time; a
plant which eventually stupifies and paralyses
those who have the sad courage to habituate
themselves to its use; a plant which, on
account of its venomous qualities, ought to be
kept under lock and key in the druggist's shop;
tobacco, in short, the legacy which a nation of
savages bequeathed to their conquerors; tobacco
—which the French of the nineteenth century
have selected to occupy their leisure and charm
away their ennuis, to perfume their streets, their
promenades, their drawing-rooms, nay, even their
nuptial couch—such is the repulsive subject
which M. Jolly devotes himself to elucidate.

This indictment is certainly heavy. In a
well-known government school (the Polytechnic),
there are annually as many "fruits secs,"
or failures, as there are pupils who have
specially distinguished themselves in the exercises
of the pipe or the cigar. But, we may ask, did
they fail because they smoked so much; or did
they smoke so much because they were idle and
careless; the idleness, and not the smoke, being
the real cause of their plucking? Also, amongst
those who take high honours, is there never a
single one who smokes? M. Jolly's statistics
are frightful—and not conclusive. Cases of
paralysis and insanity, he tells us, have
increased in direct proportion to the produce of
the tobacco tax. In 1832, it amounted to
twenty-eight millions (of francs), a sum which
had remained nearly stationary ever since 1792,
and the asylums contained eight thousand
patients. In 1862, the tax reached one
hundred and eighty millions, and the number of
insane and paralysed people had risen, in their
special hospitals, to forty-four thousand.

But, we may be permitted to observe, if
smoking be the guilty cause of certain disorders,
they ought to be confined to the sex which
smokes; otherwise, tobacco is no more responsible
for them than are fried potatoes or café au
lait. Now, there are more mad women than
mad men in France. The mad women,
however, live the longer, and have a slighter
tendency to suicide than the men.

The greatest quantity of tobacco, per head, is
consumed in the departments Nord and Pas-de-
Calais. In the provinces of Brittany and
Limousin, smoking is practised only in insignificant
proportions. Taking the whole population
of smokers, they consume, per head, some seventeen
or eighteen pounds of tobacco annually,
which, according to chemical analysis, is
equivalent to fifty or sixty grammes of nicotine per
head; that is to say, more than would kill a
squadron of mounted cavalry who should prefer
to measure their strength with tobacco instead
of the enemy. Moreover, M. Jolly insists,
tobacco stunts the growth of its votaries, and will
end by annihilating the whole French nation.
But if France, for the last eighty years and
more, has sent her finest men to the butchery,
keeping the puniest at home to become fathers
of families, is not that a sufficient reason why
the average stature of Frenchmen should be
lowered? And were the Zouaves, in the Crimean
and Italian wars, worse soldiers than the First
Napoleon's "grumblers"?

In Brittany and the Limousin, where they
scarcely smoke at all, is the standard of intelligence
higher than in the North and East, where
they smoke outrageously? Everybody ought
to know that exactly the contrary is the fact.
As to paralysis, M. Moreau (de Tours) did not
find a single case amongst all the smokers in all
the East. "The reason is," says M. Jolly,
"that Oriental tobacco contains no nicotine."
And he adds, with great reason, "Drunkenness
is unknown; and the feverish excitements of
ambition, and of the desire to make rapid
fortunes, are much less strongly developed than in
France." He accuses the cigar of separating
the sexes; because one sex does not smoke.
But, in the East, men and women are equally
addicted to the narguilhé, and remain separated
all the same. Finally, if tobacco be an infection,
a nauseous thing, destructive of good
manners and morality, equally poisonous for
individuals and society in general, one of his
colleagues recommends him to write an essay on
"Why do people smoke?"

A formidable English broadside is fired at the
weed in a very able treatise, For and Against
Tobacco, by Dr. Benjamin W. Richardson; for
the reader soon perceives that, however
impartially the inquiry may be conducted, there is
very much more "against" than "for." Thus:
No confirmed smoker can ever be said, so long
as he indulges in the habit, to be well; although it
does not follow that he is becoming the subject
of organic and fatal disease because he smokes.
The functional disturbances to which the smoker
is subjected, are presented in the blood, the
stomach, the heart, the nervous system, and
the glands of the throat and mouth. On the
blood, the prolonged inhalation of tobacco
produces changes which are very marked in character.
The fluid is thinner than is natural, and in
extreme cases paler. In such instances, the
deficient colour of the blood is communicated to
the body altogether, rendering the external
surface yellowish-white and puffy. The blood,
being thin, also exudes freely, and a cut surface
bleeds for a long time, and may continue to
bleed inconveniently, even in opposition to
remedies. But the most important change is
exerted on those little bodies which float in
myriads in the blood, and are known as the red
globules. They lose their round shape, become