at power of mental
grasp, the grip of mind which he once had. In place of his former
energy and vim and push, he is more and more inclined to take things
easy and to slide along the line of the least resistance. He becomes
less and less progressive. He dreams more and acts less. Hard work
becomes more and more irksome and repulsive, until work seems drudgery
to him.

Professor William McKeever, of the Kansas Agricultural College, in the
course of his findings after an exhaustive study of "The Cigarette
Smoking Boy" presents facts which are as appalling as they are
undeniable:

"For the past eight years I have been tracing out the cigarette boy's
biography and I have found that in practically all cases the lad began
his smoking habit clandestinely and with little thought of its
seriousness while the fond parents perhaps believed that their boy was
too good to engage in such practise.

"I have tabulated reports of the condition of nearly 2,500
cigarette-smoking schoolboys, and in describing them physically my
informants have repeatedly resorted to the use of such epithets as
'sallow,' 'sore-eyed,' 'puny,' 'squeaky-voiced,' 'sickly,'
'short-winded,' and 'extremely nervous.' In my tabulated reports it is
shown that, out of a group of twenty-five cases of young college
students, smokers, whose average age of beginning was 13, according to
their own admissions they had suffered as follows: Sore throat, four;
weak eyes, ten; pain in chest, eight; 'short wind,' twenty-one; stomach
trouble, ten; pain in heart, nine. Ten of them appeared to be very
sickly. The younger the boy, the worse the smoking hurts him in every
way, for these lads almost invariably inhale the fumes; and that is the
most injurious part of the practise."

Professor McKeever made hundreds of sphygmograph records of boys
addicted to the smoking habit. Discussing what the records showed, he
says:

"The injurious effects of smoking upon the boy's mental activities are
very marked. Of the many hundreds of tabulated cases in my possession,
several of the very youthful ones have been reduced almost to the
condition of imbeciles. Out of 2,336 who were attending public school,
only six were reported 'bright students.' A very few, perhaps ten,
were 'average,' and all the remainder were 'poor' or 'worthless' as
students. The average grades of fifty smokers and fifty non-smokers
were computed from the records of one term's work done in the Kansas
Agri