h have been
bestowed upon it by various writers. We will therefore proceed to the
few remarks which we have to make upon the three chief modes of using
tobacco, viz., snuffing, smoking, and chewing. Catherine de Medicis, the
personage said to have prompted the horrible massacre of St.
Bartholomew's day at Paris, is commonly regarded as the inventress of
snuff-taking. In Russia and Persia the penalty of death was annexed to
the use of tobacco in every form except that of snuff. For this lighter
offence, the punishment was softened down to simple mutilation, no
greater severity being deemed necessary than that of cutting off the
nose. We doubt exceedingly whether either penalty would deter the
inveterate snuff-takers of the present day. Indeed, we are told
somewhere that it was very common among the Persians to expatriate
themselves, when they were no longer allowed to indulge in tobacco in
their native country. One of the first effects of snuff is to injure the
nerves of the nose, which are endowed with exquisite sensibility, and of
which an incredible number are spread over the inner membrane of the
nostrils. This membrane is lubricated by a secretion, which has a
tendency to preserve the sense. By the almost caustic acrimony of snuff,
the mucus is dried up, and the organ of smelling becomes perfectly
callous. The consequence is, that all the pleasure we are capable of
deriving from the olfactory organs, the _omnis copia narium_, as Horace
curiously terms it, is totally destroyed. Similar effects are also
produced upon the saliva, and hence it is that habitual snuff-takers are
often unable to speak with proper distinctness; and the sense of taste
for the same reason is very much obtunded. A snuffer may always be
distinguished by a certain nasal twang--an asthmatic wheezing--and a
sort of disagreeable noise in respiration, which is nearly allied to
incipient snoring. Snuff also frequently occasions fleshy excrescences
in the nose, which, in some instances, end in polypi. Individuals have
oftentimes a predisposition to cancer in little scirrhous
intumescencies, which, if kept easy and free from every thing of an
irritating character, will continue harmless, but which the use of snuff
sometimes frets into incurable ulcers and cancers. By the use of snuff,
tumours are also generated in the throat, which obstruct deglutition,
and even destroy life. Dr. Hill saw a female die of hunger, who could
swallow no nourishment because