Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/699

Rh had been exposed to new temptations. Morphinomaniacs are absolutely incurable unless they are interned. Smokers, on the other hand, can correct themselves when they wish to. They only need a firm will. We see persons every day who have done this; and since the troubles caused by tobacco have been more definitely known we see many men giving it up of their own accord as they advance in age. The habit is so completely lost that after a few years the reformed victim can find himself in a company of smokers without feeling a desire to imitate them; and if he is moved to light a cigar he will not find the pleasure of the old days in it.

I might stop here; but I will not finish this article without giving my own explanation of the fascination of tobacco. It is probably no better than the others, and I will not try to impose it on any one.

Men have at all times eagerly sought for substances that would act on their nervous system. The tendency is general, and is exclusively human. To escape real life and the drudgery of daily occupations, to live in dream-land, in an ideal world which the imagination can people at its will, and can embellish with its illusions, have irresistible charms to some minds. In obedience to this dangerous seduction they involuntarily seek the dreams of opium and hashish, the intoxication of ether and chloral, or the grosser drunkenness of alcohol. The weak yield unresistingly to their inclination, and pass into the degrading excesses which I have reviewed. Tobacco offers no such seductions and is attended with no such dangers. Its action on the nervous system is weak and wholly special. It does not put to sleep, but it calms and mollifies the sensibility of the organs. It causes an agreeable torpor, during which thought continues lucid, and the capacity for work is not diminished. Such is the attraction it exercises, and which causes it to be sought for by so many thinkers and students. Tobacco is to them a help in mental labor. When fatigue begins and the need of a moment's rest is felt; when the thought fails to present itself with the usual exactness, and the mind hesitates over the shape to give it, the student, writer, or investigator stops, lights his pipe, and soon, by favor of this pleasant narcotic, the thought appears clear and limpid through the bluish cloud in which the smoker has enveloped himself.

I should make a wrong impression if I left it to be believed that I thought tobacco necessary to mental labor. It becomes so only for those who have contracted the habit of using it, and they