COUNTER BLASTS TO TOBACCO.
BALZAC.—"Each man is master of himself, according to modern law, but if the select or common people who read these pages believe they do not injure themselves by smoking like steam tugs, and drinking like Alexander, they deceive themselves strangely. They demoralize the race, prevent generation, from whence comes ruin of their country. Tobacco destroys the body, attacks the intelligence, and stupefies nations." Tobacco suppresses salivation, produces dyspepsia, irritates and dries the bronchial tubes, provokes sore throats, and enfeebles the action of the heart. It must certainly weaken, too, the power of propagating the species by inducing impotency, and is found to be, owing to this fact, a most powerful agent in producing depopulation. MICHELET.—"Tobacco separates man from woman, and is the most dangerous obstacle to conjugal happiness." RASPAIL.—"If the tobacco maniacs laugh at the dangers that threaten them, it is because they are partly brutalized." VICTOR HUGO.—"Tobacco is more injurious than useful; it changes thought into reverie. Thought is the labor of intelligence; reverie is its voluptuary. Replace thought by reverie, and you confound a poison with nourishment." FOURNIER.—"It is the opiate of the human mind. People who smoke are people who perish." STENDOHL.—"If smoking continues a century or two longer, the intelligence of the world will end in its fumes, and the monkey will meet man as his equal." At the present day there are but few smokers among literary men. Goethe would not admit that a man of genius smoked, or that a smoker was a man of genius.—Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic.