A THEORY OF SMOKING. "SMO MOKING," said Dr. Johnson upwards of a century ago, gone out. To be sure, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account why a thing which requires so little exertion and yet preserves the mind from vacuity, should have gone out. Every man has something by which he calms himself, beating with his feet or so." A century before Johnson's time, Madame de Sévigné had spoken not less oracularly about coffee-drinking. Racine, she said, is like coffee. Both have gone out of fashion for ever. Corneille will never cease to reign. A triple prophecy curiously confident and false. The reverse of the three legs of Man, quocumque jeceris non stabit. Coffee is the staple drink of Europe. Racine is still played in every theatre in the world. Corneille is only read-and that occasionally. How different is the masculine oracle's response! With a slight qualification, quocumque jeceris stabit. Smoking had substantially gone out. It was shocking in the respects he mentioned. It was alluring for the reasons he gave, and therefore likely to come into vogue again. In fact, his last sentence recalls Mr. Mark Lemon's touching plea that Mr. Punch smoked "for comfort, health, and soothing." The slight qualification needed is, that smoking had not entirely gone out. Just before the response, Dr. Parr had fortified himself for his celebrated Spital Sermon by a pipe in the vestry. A pipe in the vestry! To be sure, it is a shocking thing. Smoking gone out, forsooth! What would have been thought in Dryden's or in Addison's day of such an audacity? Among all the lacerations of feminine nostrils of our time, can one such outrage be recorded? Railway carriages, hansoms, waiting-rooms, provoke the suspicious sniff. But no woman now living has ever perceived the faintest whiff of nicotine in her place of worship. The first cloud in the vestry would drive out of church Mrs. Grundy and all her daughters. smoking could not have gone out entirely in Dr. Parr's day. No; But if, in Johnson's time, smoking had substantially gone out, snuffing had substantially come in again. Queen Charlotte carried her box. The great ladies of the land did likewise. The ordinary mark of regard from a crowned head was a snuff-box. The leading diplomats were overwhelmed with them. European society generally injured its nose and impaired its brain by incessant snuffing. Gradually it began to perceive that this is what it was doing. Snuffing occasionally produced deafness. A civil engineer found himself unable to calculate without his snuff-box. Mrs. Prig's snuff in her patient's broth was typical. This kind of matter was constantly getting into the wrong place. Society, in sudden dread of becoming slaves to snuff, took to cigars. But snuffing died hard. As late as the fifties a lady dipped her fingers into a snuff-box. In the sixties the snuff-box and yellow handkerchief had not disappeared from the Bench. In the House of Commons, in the eighties, one notorious blocker consoled himself against derisive cheers with snuff. Snuffboxes are still placed after dinner on the tables of the Inns of Court. In the meantime various objections were raised to cigars. At first they were all low-priced and made abroad of fine tobacco. With the increased demand the price rose higher and higher. The fine tobacco was limited to the outer leaf; the rest of the cigar was coarse leaf, coarser stalk, and viler stuff still. Many cigars were made in England. Many more were made in Germany from home-grown plants. Good cigars became the luxuries of the rich, and the world took to pipes. No sooner had pipes come into fashion than a fresh crop of evils revealed itself. Nothing is easier to adulterate than tobacco. In cake or strips it courts impurities. It may be steeped, even in water, until it is almost poisonous. It may be blended with almost any kind of abomination. A clay pipe, used only once, is perhaps free from extraneous contamination. But how often is a clay pipe used only once? A pipe of wood or meerschaum is often used for years and never thoroughly cleaned. No mouthpiece can protect its smoker against increasing foulness. The smallest pipe, too, holds a considerable quantity of tobacco. A pipe smoker, with his pipe constantly in his mouth, and perhaps even yielding occasionally to the ridiculous invitation to smoke in bed, little thinks how much tobacco he is consuming. At last the soldier, especially the recruit, has been reported to the War Office as often stupefied or intoxicated by tobacco, and an official warning has been issued against excessive pipe-smoking and strong tobacco. But long before this the upper classes had taken alarm. The cigarette superseded the pipe. An emperor set the example. A complimentary cigarette-case displaced the complimentary snuff-box. European How often is the cutty pipe black? society congratulated itself on its escape from excess and death in the pipe to temperance and safety in the cigarette. Sir Henry Thompson demolished this notion. He showed that a mouthpiece of cotton-wool is saturated with foul, black mud if a single cigarette is smoked through it. The faculty followed suit, and from numerous instances drew the deduction that cigarette-smoking is the most injurious of all existing modes of using tobacco. In truth, from the moment of its introduction by Sir Walter Raleigh, tobacco, in some form, has been the favourite narcotic of Europe, and every form has been more or less injurious. The quid, the snuff-box, the pipe, the cigar, the cigarette-each embodies a phase of error. A wayfarer once presented a rose to the nose of a horse on a London cab rank. The horse tried to seize the flower with his mouth. When it was given to him he chewed it with delight. Absurd ignorance! says the reader. How about the quid? Suppose the horse had torn the rose into fragments and stuffed them into his nostrils? Suppose he had put the rose-leaves inside a roll of paper, placed the roll in his mouth and lighted it? Suppose he had rolled up the leaves without paper and placed that roll in his mouth and lighted it? Suppose he had filled a bowl of wood, china, or baked clay with the rose-leaves, fixed a stem in the bowl, put one end of the stem in his mouth, and then lighted the rose-leaves? Suppose, when those leaves were burnt, he had refilled the bowl with fresh rose-leaves and burnt them in the same way without cleaning bowl or stem? Absurder ignorance! says the reader. Yet in such wise does man deal with tobacco. Tobacco consists of the leaves and stalk of a plant, charged with an aroma, purifying, sustaining, exhilarating, and fragrant to the human being. Like the aroma of a rose, this aroma should be inhaled, in the form of cool vapour, by the human nose. The chewer, like the cab-horse, eats the leaves and stalk. He uses the tobacco at the right temperature but in the wrong form, and puts it into the wrong place. The snuffer reduces the leaves and stalk to powder, and puts it into his nose. He uses the tobacco at the right temperature, and puts it into the right place, but converts it into a wrong form. The cigar smoker gets the tobacco into the right form, but puts it at a wrong temperature into a wrong place. The cigarette smoker blends the filthy rags and other materials out of which paper is made with the tobacco. The pipe smoker puts his tobacco into a receptacle which is used for an indefinite time, is very difficult to clean, and tends to produce cancer of the tongue and lips. Moreover, in all forms of smoking, the tobacco becomes saturated with the smoker's breath. This seems to be almost poisonous. It was this that produced the foul black mud in Sir Henry Thompson's mouthpiece. It is this which causes the lower half of a smoked cigar, if left on a table for a few hours, to become indescribably rank. It is this which makes the smoke of tobacco in a foul pipe noxious, and the smoke of tobacco not pressed down to the bottom of a clean bowl nauseous, even to the smoker himself. For wholesome smoking, the lower half of the cigar or cigarette should be thrown away; the pipe-bowl should be kept as clean as the stem, the tobacco pressed well down in it, and the contents, when threequarters have been consumed, shaken out. All the injury to the smoker will then arise from the red-hot smoke, ashes, and dirt with which he plasters his mouth, throat, and stomach. Nature protests as best she may against this varied abuse of her bounty. She tweaks the incipient snuffer's nose with endless "magnificent sneezes." She weakens the cigar-smoker's heart, and sometimes threatens him with paralysis. She inflicts cancer of the lips and tongue upon the pipe smoker. A child who sucks a foul pipe she sometimes strikes dead. What is the lesson she is trying to teach? What is the right mode of using her delightful gift? Obviously to reduce it to vapour, to cool the vapour, and to apply the pure cold vapour to the nose. For this end a combination of the hookah and Rimmel's odoriser is all that is needed. If you stand on the grating of a snuff manufactory, how delicious is the odour ! Such would be the contents of a tobacco scent-bottle, equally exhilarating to both sexes, a disinfectant, a restorative, and a perfume in one ! In the United States the cognate idea was recently suggested of manufacturing pure tobacco smoke like gas, and laying it on like gas in buildings of various sorts. If this idea were carried out, the air of hospitals, theatres, churches, law courts, sick rooms, would cease to be poisonous, and would become fragrant and exhilarating. The tobacco scent-bottle and the tobacco meter would, between them, revolutionise everything connected with smoking. Filth, poisons, and disease would be replaced by purity, cordials, and health. Cigarettes, cigars, and pipes would disappear. Such horrors as collecting cigar-ends by the ton for manufacture into cigars and tobacco would be relegated to the limbo of tradition. Smoke would supersede scent in Romish chapels, and stuffiness in Protestant churches. Indignant ladies might even be found complaining that the pew, the opera-box, or the railway carriage was not pervaded enough by the deodoriser. To be sure, it would be a shocking thing. H. BOULT. PATERNITY. HE sire has struck the son. THE Both heroes-peers— Grandees of Spain. The son, Don Ruy, was bred Scarce twenty summers bloomed above his head, The sire was greater still. His hair was white. |