CIGARS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 24, 1881

CIGARS.

To the world in general a cigar is merely a thickly-rolled packet, having brittle fragments of dry leaves within, and a smooth, silky leaf for its outer wrapper. When it is burnt, and the pleasantly-flavored smoke is inhaled, the habitual smoker claims for it a soothing luxury that quiets the irritable nervous organism, relieves weariness, and entices repose.

Science scouting so superficial a description, examines first the smoke, second the leaf, third the ash. In the smoke is discovered water in a vaporous state, soot (free carbon), carbonic acid, and carbonic oxide, and a vaporous substance condensable into oily nicotine. These are general divisions, which chemists have still further split up, and in so doing have found acetic, formic, buteric, galeric, and propionic acids, prussic acid, creosote and carbolic acid, ammonia, sulphureted hydrogen, pyridine, viridine, picoline, lutidine, collidine, parvoline, corodine, and rubidene. These last are a series of oily bases belonging to the homologs of aniline, first discovered in coal-tar.

Applying chemical tests to the leaves, other chemists have found nicotia, tobacco camphor, or nicotianine (about which not much is known), a bitter extractive matter, gum chlorophyl, malate of lime, sundry albuminoids, malic acid, woody fibre, and various salts. The feathery white ash, which in its cohesion and whiteness is indicative of a good cigar, yields potash, soda and magnesia, lime, phosphoric acid, silica, and chlorine.

The ingredients extractable from a poor and cheap cigar would be fearful and wonderful to contemplate. Here is a list from a Parliamentary report on adulteration in tobacco: sugar, alum, lime, flour or meal, rhubarb leaves, saltpetre, fuller's earth, starch, malt commings, chromate of lead, peat moss, molasses, burdock leaves, common salt, endive leaves, lampblack, gum, red dye, a black dye composed of vegetable-red and licorice, scraps of newspaper, cinnamon stick, cabbage leaves, and straw brown paper.—Sel.