Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/696

678 more than we (the French), and yet we have to admit that these Germans are not as dull as they should be by the theory, that they do not cut a bad figure in the scientific world, and that they hold a preponderant position in Europe. A more specious argument than this is one which the detractors of tobacco draw from the enfeeblement of memory which many observers pretend to have remarked. This would be a serious matter if the charge was sustained; but it does not appear to me proved. Instances have been related in good faith, it is true, of persons who are supposed to have lost their memories through the use of tobacco; but my impression is, that the loss can be more properly attributed to advancing age.

I have no thought of writing an apology for tobacco, or of asking for the erection of a statue of Jean Nicot. Smoking is a bad habit for everybody, especially for women and children. But because tobacco is a grand culprit is a reason why it should not be painted blacker than it is. If we exaggerate its faults and attribute imaginary ones to it, we run the risk of wholly missing our aim. In fact, children whom we are trying to preserve from it, when they see smokers around them able-bodied and sparkling with wit, are disposed to think we are deceiving them when we hold up this bugbear before them, and will come to not believing the real evils of the bad habit against which we are trying to fortify them.

Last to be considered is the philosophical side of the question: What is the motive that impels so many persons to contract an inconvenient, expensive, and unhealthy habit? The problem is insoluble to persons who do not smoke. "I can never comprehend," lately said a professor of hygiene, "the enjoyment one can feel in converting his mouth into a chimney-flue." Dupuytren called the habit of smoking the ignoble pleasure of poisoning one's self and others. This is not surprising; but it is more so that smokers themselves can not account for the fact. The general opinion is, that we begin to smoke to imitate others, and continue it by habit, as a distraction, or means of dispelling ennui. "The boy of fourteen or fifteen years, beginning to smoke," says M. Dumas, "does not seek a cerebral excitement in the new habit any more than one who is beginning to drink. He simply imitates the bearded persons whom he sees with the pipe or cigar in their mouths. It is to him one of the signs of the virility to which he aspires. It is the easiest way for him to make himself believe that he is already a man, and to make the public believe it." This is true, but few smokers can find any traces of this feeling in their recollections; but while the desire of affirming one's virility and doing like others may explain the first essays in the face of the pains that attend them, it does not account for the irresistible attraction of the habit once formed and the readiness with which it establishes itself.