EVOLUTION OF THE CIGARET SMOKER.
By David Starr Jordan
ALL forms of nerve stimulus are of the nature of a trick on the nervous system. The pleasurable or satisfying feeling that they may cause is a deception, and each deception renders the future actions of the nervous system less trustworthy. In proportion as this happens, the nervous system becomes degenerate or "wears out." The pleasure derived from the use of stimulants is therefore only a semblance of pleasure and is obtained by the destruction of those structures on which the feelings of pleasure and pain depend. In adult life this injury may leave no great traces. In youth any injury to the nervous system causes a permanent deterioration. There is, as we know, a false notion of manliness current among boys—a notion that manhood lies in the vices and dissipations of a man, rather than in the development of a man's strength. By carrying out this idea, in11one way or another, the development of true manhood is often rendered impossible. As a college teacher, my experience with boys who have formed the cigaret habit is somewhat limited. It, however, confirms me in the opinion that such boys are like wormy apples; they drop long before harvest-time. Very few of them ever advance far beyond the first year. They rarely make failures in after-life, because they do not have any after life. The boy who begins cigaret smoking before his fifteenth year, never enters the life of the world. When the other boys are taking hold of the world's work he is concerned with the sexton and the undertaker. There is one grim argument to be made for the use of cigarets by boys. It helps in the survival of the fittest. The manly boy does not take to such things. He has life in him, plays football, does anything but deaden himself with narcotics. The cigaret boy does none of these things. He becomes ill when work is laid upon him. His friends are solicitous because he studies so hard and looks so pale. He is withdrawn from school, and after a few years of life with shattered nerves he passes away, leaving the place he might have filled to the "deep-lunged children of the fatherland." But all vice is corrosive and spreads from the rotten to the sound. Every year men whose lives are worth saving are wrecked through foolish notions of manliness caught from youthful associates. It is bad morals and bad economics to permit this waste. No community can afford to "throw good life after bad" in the way tolerated in San Francisco.—David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University.