a noble animal,
an elegant game, and a luscious kernel. Had Linnaeus seen this tree,
he would have assuredly contemplated it with delightful ecstacy, and
named it the _Ae'_sculus Hippocastanum.--_Magazine of Natural
History._

* * * * *

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

* * * * *

CIGAR-SMOKING.

The Surgeon-General of the Forces has recently made public his
belief, that never, till within the last twenty years, did he see so
many young men with pale faces and emaciated figures, and he attributes
the existence of the evil to the use of Cigars. The unreflecting
servility with which men adopt new and foreign practices, is fully
exemplified in the present case; for it is notorious that the practice
of cigar-smoking, the modern foppery from Regent-street to Cheapside and
Cornhill, was an importation of the Peninsular War; the imitation having
been begun by the Spaniards, whose models are what are usually called
the _savages_ of America. The dietetic mischief, and consequent
paleness of complexion and emaciation of muscle, which are attributable
to the use of cigars, belong, no doubt, to an injury inflicted, perhaps,
in more ways than one upon the aids and organs of digestion; nor is
that hypothesis at all inconsistent with what we hear from so many
cigar-smokers, namely, that their cigar is their dependence for
digestion! That, after having impaired the organ, or weakened its tone,
or dried up the salival menstruum, they should need a stimulant, even in
the very form of the bane which injures them, is only of a piece with
all that has been said of drinking, and especially of dram-drinking,
with which latter debauch, the debauch of cigar-smoking has the closest
possible alliance. We never pass one of those stifling rendezvous in the
metropolis--a cigar-shop, open till the latest hours--without mentally
classing it with the gin-shops, its only compeers!

Exclusive of the low habit of imitation, a dulness and feebleness of
understanding, an absence of intellectual resources, a vacuity of
thought is the great inducement to the use of this, as of all other
drugs, whether from the cigar-shop, or the snuff-shop, or the gin-shop,
or the wine-cellar; a truth by no means the less certain, because it
happens that men of the highest powers of mind are drawn into the vice,
and made to reduce themselves, by their adoption and dependence upon it,
to the lowest le