the eulogy of A.B., who
recently died at the age of ninety-nine, without ever tasting ardent
spirits; to-morrow's will add the epitaph of C.D., aged one hundred, who
has imbibed a quart of rum a day since reaching the age of indiscretion;
and yet, after all, both editors have to admit that the drinking usages
of society are growing decidedly more decent. It is the same with the
tobacco argument. Individual cases prove nothing either way; there is
such a range of vital vigor in different individuals, that one may
withstand a life of error, and another perish in spite of prudence. The
question is of the general tendency. It is not enough to know that Dr.
Parr smoked twenty pipes in an evening, and lived to be seventy-eight;
that Thomas Hobbes smoked thirteen, and survived to ninety-two; that
Brissiac of Trieste died at one hundred and sixteen, with a pipe in his
mouth; and that Henry Hartz of Schleswig used tobacco steadily from the
age of sixteen to one hundred and forty-two; nor would any accumulation
of such healthy old sinners prove anything satisfactory. It seems
rather overwhelming, to be sure, when Mr. Fairholt assures us that his
respected father "died at the age of seventy-two: he had been twelve
hours a day in a tobacco-manufactory for nearly fifty years; and he both
smoked and chewed while busy in the labors of the workshop, sometimes in
a dense cloud of steam from drying the damp tobacco over the stoves; and
his health and appetite were perfect to the day of his death: he was a
model of muscular and stomachic energy; in which his son, who neither
smokes, snuffs, nor chews, by no means rivals him." But until we know
precisely what capital of health the venerable tobacconist inherited
from his fathers, and in what condition he transmitted it to his sons,
the statement certainly has two edges.

For there are facts equally notorious on the other side. It is not
denied that it is found necessary to exclude tobacco, as a general
rule, from insane asylums, or that it produces, in extreme cases, among
perfectly sober persons, effects akin to delirium tremens. Nor is it
denied that terrible local diseases follow it,--as, for instance,
cancer of the mouth, which has become, according to the eminent surgeon,
Brouisson, the disease most dreaded in the French hospitals. He has
performed sixty-eight operations for this, within fourteen years, in the
Hospital St. Eloi, and traces it entirely to the use of tobacco. Such
fact