sacredly
preserved, and the result is nervous bankruptcy. Understanding that
nervous bankruptcy of the parent threatens the welfare of future
generations through the law of heredity, we will surely hesitate to
bring ourselves under the strain produced by the use of these
substances.

The most dangerous habit of the present would almost seem to be the
tobacco habit, because it is considered quite respectable and is
therefore almost universal. Men who are prominent, not only as
statesmen and business men, but also as moral leaders, smoke with no
apparent recognition of the evils, and lads can often sanction their
beginning of the habit by the fact that a certain pastor or
Sunday-school superintendent is a smoker.

But science has not been idle in regard to the investigation of the
effects of tobacco, and the discoveries made have been published, so
that we are not now ignorant of the tobacco heart, or tobacco throat,
or tobacco nerves, nor of the transmission of nerve degeneracy to the
children of smokers.

Girls sometimes think it is a great joke to smoke cigarettes for fun,
and some grow into the habit of smoking, but the injury is not
lessened by the fact that the use of the cigarette was begun in jest,
nor that the user is a woman.

In fact, the _Medical Times_ is quite inclined to assert that much of
the neurasthenia, including a general disturbance of the digestive
organs, now so common in that portion of the female sex who have ample
means and leisure to indulge in any luxury agreeable to their taste,
or which, for the time being, may contribute to their enjoyment, is
due to narcotics.

During the Civil War we are told that 13 per cent. of all men
examined were excluded as unfit for military service. We are now told
that 31 per cent. are found to be unfit. Nearly one-third of the young
men found physically incompetent to be soldiers! From what cause?
Certainly tobacco must bear a large share of the blame.

Some years ago Major Houston, of the Naval School at Annapolis, made
the statement that one-fifth of the boys who applied for admittance
were rejected on account of heart disease, and that 90 per cent. of
these had produced the heart difficulty by the use of tobacco.

Dr. Pidduch asserts that "the hysteria, the hypochondriasis, the
consumption, the dwarfish deformities, the suffering lives and early
deaths of the children of inveterate smokers, bear ample testimony to
the feebleness of constitution whic