A Physician's Verdict on Tobacco.
FEW, even of inveterate adult smokers, will commend the weed to young men. However much they may justify the use of tobacco in their own case, they are yet clear-headed enough and reasonable enough not to encourage boys to form a habit which they know to be expensive, useless, and disagreeable to many, while it may prove positively injurious to brain and health. Dr. Pope, a professor of hygiene, and lecturer on the special staff of the Health Society, London, lifts an energetic warning voice against allowing boys to use tobacco at all. He describes the oil which is distilled from the tobacco leaf in smoking as of "an acrid and most poisonous nature, producing a sensation of burning in the mouth, and paralyzing particularly the spinal cord and motor nerves, while the nicotine—another oil, but volatile—affects more directly the heart through the brain itself." And after telling how the use of tobacco is likely to derange in the most serious way the digestive organs, he adds:— "There is this undoubted fact also—nothing can be more pernicious for boys and growing youths than the use of tobacco in any of its forms. There can be no hesitation about this matter; it points directly to physical degeneration, and is probably the greatest source of physical evil that the next generation will have to lament. Boys, it is indeed a deadly poison to you! It stunts your growth; it destroys your stomach, which should be organizing your food into flesh and blood; it blunts your brains, which should be brilliant and active, and it threatens your very manhood." Such testimony as this from one of the highest medical authorities ought to be heeded by every parent and guardian of the young. The cigarette, especially, is both a nuisance and a curse—a nuisance to many delicate people, into whose unwilling nostrils the reckless urchin puffs its poisonous fumes, and a curse to the urchin himself in many ways. It is time we all should join in creating a public sentiment strong enough to stamp this infantile vice out of existence. It could not survive a week if grown-up people would only frown on it as it deserves.—Christian at Work.