e favorable result.

The second position is equally unsupported either by experience or sound
reasoning; and is contrary not only to all medical authority on this
subject, but against the investigations of other scientific men who have
chemically examined the constituent principles of tobacco, and who have
experimented largely to ascertain with precision its natural operation
on the living fibre. The lower order of animals have been selected for
these experiments. Given in substance to them, it has uniformly proved
fatal, even in very minute doses.

When its expressed juice or essential oil has been introduced under the
skin of pigeons, kittens, or rabbits, it produced violent convulsions
and often instantaneous death. Does any one doubt the correctness of
these experiments? He can easily satisfy himself of their accuracy, by
obtaining the oil of tobacco, and applying eight or ten drops to the
root of a kitten's tongue. The same deadly effects, as we have seen,
uniformly attend its first application to the human system, if taken to
any considerable extent. This is well understood by its consumers, who
are very cautious for many weeks, and even months, how they deal with
the poisonous drug.

By what transformation is a plant, so deadly in its effects when first
applied to the human system, afterward converted into a harmless article
of diet or luxury? No substance which God has made for the common use of
man, produces similar results; and if such be the fact in relation to
the article in question, in this instance at least the order of nature
is reversed, so that what in its nature is poisonous, becomes by habit
nutritious and salutary. If this be correct reasoning--farewell to the
success of temperance efforts! For _Rum_, after all, may be _convenient_
if not necessary, because its effects are not in every instance
immediately fatal; and because some, by dint of habit, can sustain with
slight _apparent_ injury, what to others unaccustomed to it would
produce instantaneous death.

The stale excuse, so often repeated by the lovers of tobacco, that they
have been advised to use it by physicians, for the mitigation or removal
of some bodily infirmity, may be urged with equal force and propriety by
the tippler and the sot; for many, very many, have been advised by
members of the Faculty, to drink the deadly draught, in some form or
other, either to ease the pains of dyspepsia, to allay the horrors of
_tedium vitae_, or t