TOBACCO A DEADLY POISON.
By Dio Lewis
LET us make an experiment. Here is a boy, ten years old, who has never used tobacco. "Charley, will you help us to make an experiment?" "Here is a piece of plug tobacco as large as a pea. Put it into your mouth, chew it. Don't let one drop go down your throat, but spit every drop of juice into that spittoon. Keep on chewing, spitting, chewing, spitting." Before he is done with that little piece of tobacco, simply squeezing the juice out of it, without swallowing a drop, he will lie here on the platform in a cold, deathlike perspiration. Put your fingers upon his wrists. There is no pulse. He will seem for two or three hours to be dying. Again, steep a plug of tobacco in a quart of water, and with the mixture bathe the neck and back of a calf troubled with vermin. You will kill the vermin, but if not very careful, you will kill the calf too. These experiments show that tobacco, in its ordinary state, is an extremely powerful poison. Go to the chemist's; begin with the upper shelves and take down every bottle. Then open every drawer, and you cannot find a single poison (except some rare one) which, taken into the mouth of that ten-year-old boy and not swallowed, will produce such deadly effects. No devotee of the weed has ever graduated at the head of his class, at Harvard, or any other college where statistics have been preserved, notwithstanding the fact that a large majority of college students are smokers.—Dr. Dio Lewis.