the White Nile: "Salt they have none, and when I have offered it to them, they have invariably repudiated it, disliking its taste." This is the only example I have ever met with in my reading of any people, however wild or savage, refusing it. All animals seek it eagerly, and seem to enjoy it and benefit from its administration.

The whole class of bitters have been made use of as beverages, merely I suppose because of their strong impression on the gustatory nerves; Cullen, however, ranks them all as narcotic. Some of them are decidedly so, as hops and wormwood mingled in ales, beer, and absynthe.

Tea and coffee find a place under the same category, but we take them too much diluted generally to obtain any marked influence from them. They cheer, certainly, as Cowper writes; but they do not inebriate. I have no doubt that even the comparatively inefficient use we make of them silently tends to the gratification of our instinctive propensity, and thus they save thousands (unconscious of the benefit) from the temptation to intemperance This view is clearly taken by Lecky in his "History of European Morals." "The introduction of hot drinks. was the beginning of a great social change. Coffee-houses became the most important centres of society, and gave a new tone to national manners. The effect of hot drinks upon domestic life was probably greater in England than on the continent. Checking the boisterous revels that had once been universal, and raising woman to a new position in the domestic circle, they have contributed very largely to refine manners, to introduce a new order of tastes, and to soften and improve the character of men." Coffee, doubtless, assists the Turk in his obedience to his Koran; and tea might have fixed the "heathen Chinee" in his time-honored and sober semi-civilization, but for the forcible intrusion by the English, of opium and other foreign narcotics upon him, in spite of his sullen and unavailing repugnance.

It is rare, I think, to find a drunkard developed where there has been a notable fondness for either tea or coffee. Thus also, the yer

bamaté serves the South American as a protective; the Polynesian is thus benefitted by his kava; and the Peruvian by his coca. None of them, however, plays so important a part in this relation as tobacco, which indeed merits to be treated of separately. Its history is very strange and full of seeming incongruities Poisonous even in small doses, it is nevertheless, so much in harmony with the human constitution, that there are few who cannot educate themselves into absolute fondness for it, and some resort to it early and at once with pleasure. There is no single substance in such familiar and universal use all over the world. We may note some differences as it affects different races. The great majority of Caucasians must go through a hard initiation when learning to smoke it, and nothing in human history affords so strong an illustration of the force of social sympathy, the animal tendency to imitation, and the ready sacrifice of the present to the future, as the conduct of the simple youths, who offer themselves annually as recruits to the grand army of smokers. But of the Australians, Scherzer tells us that "it is no unusual thing to see the infant in arms take the short' cuttie' pipe coolly out of its mother's mouth, and begin to smoke it." The Anglo-American almost invariably spits largely when he chews or smokes; a few exceptions occur but they are rare. One of my friends kept his mouth always full of tobacco, whenever he was not eating, or drinking, or brushing his teeth. He lived to a good old age, though a martyr to gout; but he must have swallowed a prodigious amount of nicotin; for his last act in going to bed was, uniformly to take a fresh quid of proper size; after which he was in the habit of waking once or twice during the night to change it as in the day.

In one of our recent journals, a report is given of the reading to a County Medical Society of an essay upon this plant, in which the author estimated its consumption in this country at the rate of seven and a half pounds per annum for every man, woman, and child. He regards it as but slightly narcotic, because it renders some persons wakeful; but there is no necessary connection between narcotism and hypnotism. Hydrate of

chloral, the most direct and trustworthy hypnotic known to us, is hardly narcotic at all, and poisonous we know not how, but only in very large doses. One of the members of the Society mentioned "a dock-yard laborer in England, who eat tobacco, and made his meals on it (see "Med. Times," March 15th, 1871) without any injurious effect." Among us, the original uneducated tolerance of tobacco is an idiosyncrasy, like that which enables some men to go to sea with impunity, while the majority must pass through a harsh, nauseating process, before they can endure the motion of a ship. We have all witnessed the agonies of a tyro, manipulating his first pipe or cigar-his paleness, cold sweat, vertigo, nausea, and vomiting, with intolerable cramps and spasms. Many smokers and chewers undergo a renewal of their tortures, whenever by chance or misfortune, they swallow even a small amount of the saliva which they habitually eject. Some dry smokers were spoken of in the Society, and the English laborer was considered a very extraordinary case. But we are told by Capt. Wilkes, of the Exploring Squadron and of Trent-seizure memory, that the natives of Drummond's Island in the North Seas-probably of Malay originare "so extravagantly fond of tobacco and so eager after it, that when one had put a piece into his mouth, others would seize him and actually force it out with their fingers." "They are truly disgusting," he continues, "for they eat and swallow it with a zest and pleasure indescribable. Their whole mind seems bent upon obtaining this luxury." (Vol. v., p. 62.)

In his "Wild Sports of India," Capt. Shakspeare, of the British Army, writing of tobacco as a febrifuge, says: "No sportsman here (Ko-koor Ghaut, Neilgherries) should be without it. These wild men of the jungles will eat an incredible quantity of it; not merely chewing and spitting out the quid, but allowing it to pass into the stomach, enough at one time to poison half a dozen men, who were not used to it. My own Shikarrees used to eat a good deal, instead of smoking it," (p. 158.)

The ordinary effect of tobacco is to diminish sensibility and

sensitiveness, lower the pulse, and soothe and calm the mind; an approach to that happy negative condition of the living organism, which the Turk knows and enjoys as "Kief," the product of his coffee and narghilé; and the Buddhist earnestly covets and seeks as "Nirvanna.” I have never known it to inebriate, but Whymper ascribes to it a direct intoxicating power. Among the natives of Alaska and that Northern region it is lavishly used. "The true 'Tchutktchi' mode of smoking," he tells us, "is to swallow all the fumes of the tobacco; and I have seen them, after six or eight pulls at the pipe, fall back completely intoxicated for the time being," (p. 114.) We could wish that he had indulged us with some details of the symptoms of this nicotian drunkenness.

We may clearly comprehend the intensity of desire, arising from indulgence in narcotics, even when of no inviting taste or flavor and when of foreign origin, by the anxiety to obtain tobacco when its subjects have been deprived of it.

A strong illustration of this is given in the "Edinburg Review" for July, 1849: "The desire of obtaining tobacco in Van Dieman's Land (then a penal British station) led not only to great irregularities and an enormous amount of punishment, but to the commission of the most dreadful crimes. The temptation to indulge in it was so great as altogether to overpower the fear of punishment. By acting upon this vehement propensity, the amount of work obtained from the convicts at Norfolk Island was increased from one-third to one-half, and even doubled. It has the very best effects on discipline; the men are active and diligent all day, remaining as long as the overseers will permit, and returning to the station by moonlight without a grumble."

I acknowledge my total inabiliiy to explain the insusceptibility to the poisonous action of this dangerous drug above. recorded. Idiosyncracies explain degrees of tolerance, but the statements go far beyond this. Such diversity of degree of effect as almost to change the nature of the impression made, we find in certain of the more properly stimulant narcotics.

Some subjects collapse and die at once under chloroform; some are incapable of any other effect from ether than its exciting and maddening action. In nitrous oxyd or the exhilarating gas, we see the most singularly contrasted results of administration. Davy offers it to his friends and visitors as a mirth-inspiring cordial; the young members of college classes and public audiences at an exhibition, are indulged with a few whiffs of it, and are aroused to furious pugnacity, equally furious love-making, or break out with lofty declamation, or shouts of laughter and cries of delight; while the dentist, on the other hand, in a brief minute or two with the same inhalation, reduces his victim to absolute insensibility, and works his will upon him with entire and most passive acquiescence. Another unfortunate tendency exhibited by it exceptionally and in but a few instances, however, is the prompt induction of collapse and prostration, painful to witness, and slow to recover from.

I cannot but wonder that commercial enterprise has not yet. introduced among us the betel nut and the coca, to offer variety and novelty to the chewers of tobacco, and a substituted pleasure to those who shrink from the taste and odor of the familiar weed The betel or areca nut, sprinkled with a little chalk and enveloped in a green aromatic betel leaf, sometimes with the addition of catechu or the cajeput resin, constitutes the delight of millions of Hindoos and other Easterns, among whom it has been in use from the earliest times. If we ask what is the inducement, the temptation to betel chewing, we are furnished with an ample reply, quoted by Scherzer from a Sanskrit poem, Hytopedesa: "Betel is pungent, bitter, aromatic, sweet, alkaline, astringent, a carminative, a dispeller of phlegm, a vermifuge, a sweetener of the breath, an ornament of the mouth, a remover of impurities, and a kindler of the flame of love. Oh, friend!" exclaims the enthusiastic eulogist, "these thirteen properties of betel are hardly to be met with, even in Heaven."

But there seems no unfamiliar article of the character of narcotic so worthy of our attention and so well deserving of introduction, both into our materia alimentaria and materia med