Tobacco and Scholarship.
By Christian Union
ONE of the professors of the Polytechnic School of Paris inquired into the habits of the one hundred and sixty students there, and then made a comparison between their devotion to study and to smoke. He found that one hundred and two were smokers, and fifty-eight never used, or said they never used, the noxious weed. He then found that in each grade of the school the students who did not smoke out-ranked those who did smoke, and that the scholarship of the smokers steadily deteriorated as the smoking continued. On account of several trustworthy reports of such a nature, the minister of public instruction in France issued a circular to the directors of colleges and schools forbidding tobacco to students, as injurious to physical and intellectual development. The Catholic Guardian is authority for the statement that the youth of Catholic colleges are not allowed to use tobacco in any way; and to this fact is attributed much of their proficiency in mathematics and also the other branches which wear more particularly on the intellect than some others.