are engaged
in the manufacture of tobacco; that the workmen are in general meagre,
jaundiced, emaciated, asthmatic, subject to colic, diarrheas, to
vertigo, violent headach, and muscular twitchings, to narcotism, and to
various diseases of the breast and lungs.[48] They have also declared
that some of these evils have befallen families from the fact alone of
being in the neighbourhood of a tobacco manufactory.[49] Ramazzini says
that even the horses employed in the tobacco mills are most powerfully
affected by the particles of the tobacco. Now if these things be true,
when we call to mind the countless multitudes employed in this "dreadful
trade," what a throng of evils present themselves upon the very
threshold of our subject.[50] In this view of the case, one could not
pass such a manufactory without an involuntary shudder, regarding it as
a charnel house, or rather as a Pandora's box, to those wretched beings
who are doomed to work or dwell within its pestilential precincts.[51]
But in spite of the various and respectable testimony which has been
produced by writers opposed to the use of tobacco, we cannot help
regarding their statements as exceedingly exaggerated. We have not space
to enter into a more minute examination of this portion of our subject,
but to such of our readers as may feel desirous of prosecuting the
inquiry, we take great pleasure in recommending a very able memoir by
Messieurs Parent-Duchatelet and D'Arcet,[52] in which the whole subject
of the effects of tobacco upon the persons connected with its
manufacture, is most satisfactorily discussed, and the opinions and
assertions of those who have gone so far as to declare that it was even
necessary to the public health that the manufactories of tobacco should
be removed out of large towns because of their great insalubrity, shown
to be either without any just grounds, or the results of prejudice and
ignorance.

The fecundity of this plant is marvellous. Linnaeus has calculated that a
single plant of tobacco contains 40,320 grains, and says that if each
seed came to perfection, the plants of tobacco in vegetation in the
course of four years, would be more than sufficient to cover the whole
surface of the earth. We are elsewhere informed that these seeds
preserve their germinative properties for six years and even longer.
"Sir Thomas Browne observes," says Mather, "that of the seeds of
tobacco, a thousand make not one grain, (though Otto de Guericke,