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central department instituted purposely to collect all information bearing upon the subject, and that it has a chief like Admiral Fitzroy, whose heart is in his business, and who seems never better pleased than when he is collecting from any source, however insignificant, a fact that is noteworthy-unless it be when he is diffusing his knowledge so attained either to individuals or the public at large. The growth of this new department seems to bear the same relation to the Shipwreck Relief Society and the Lifeboat Society that preventive medicine does to remedial medicine. Indeed, as we progress in knowledge we are beginning to find out that prevention is better than cure; and, what is more to the purpose, we are becoming enabled to put this prevention in practice.

THE NEW COUNTERBLAST TO TOBACCO.

THERE is a class of persons who employ themselves with all the energy of despair in raising some cry of alarm, and making everybody about them unnecessarily uncomfortable. They parade their bugaboo with a desperation which ensures a temporary public attention, and as soon as this dies out, they start another of a still more attractive appearance. The Vegetarians would reduce mankind to live upon skyblue and an apple, or at best an egg; the Maine law liquor men would legislate all spirituous and malt liquors off the face of the earth; and now we are to have an anti-tobacco-smoking agitation which is to end in the entire demolition of the "Stygian weed." It is quite clear that this restless class of individuals will not "let a body be," and we may think ourselves lucky if hereafter we are not reduced by them to have our diet regulated by Act of Parliament. The antitobacco-smoking agitation is the last issue of this very unpleasant brood, and we believe we are indebted to Mr. John Lizars, of Edinburgh, for the hatching, rearing, and sending it forth in a little pamphlet, termed "Practical Observations on the Use and

Abuse of Tobacco," which has already gone through six editions. Upon taking up this publication the other day, we were certainly not a little surprised at some of the statements therein contained, which are calculated, we must confess, to shake the nerves of all smokers already enervated by the abuse of tobacco. The art of making an immediate and startling impression has, however, its drawbacks. Accuracy of detail and sequential reasoning must be sacrificed to a breadth and startlingness of effect. When the urchin sets up his turnip-ghost in the churchyard, he cares little for the Phidian accuracy of its countenance, so long as its goggle eyes at once prostrate Tommy as he comes round the corner.

This little work of Mr. Lizars is open, we fear, to hostile criticism in this direction, as we shall endeavour to point out. Of course it would not be worth the while of the writer to show that the habit of smoking affects only a few isolated individuals, so he at once elevates it into a great and pregnant cause of the destruction of peoples and empires. "Excessive smoking has had no small share in degenerating Spain," he tell us in the preface to his fourth edition. Portugal and Germany are pretty nearly as bad as Spain; but Turkey is "a gone coon" all along of "all tobacco-smoke :

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There can be no doubt, from what has occurred in the war just ended, that, had the Turks never indulged in the vicious habit of smoking tobacco, they would not have required the assistance of the Sardinians, French, and British. They would have been as powerful as in the days of the Sultans Othman, Orchan, Amurath the First, and Bajazet; and would have sent such a message

through Menschikoff to the Czar Nicholas as the Sultan Bajazet sent to the Count de Nevers of France, when taken prisoner, after his celebrated unsuccessful cavalry charge (like that of Balaclava) near Nicopolis.

Thus the better part of Europe and Asia has sunk from its high estate, chiefly in consequence of this vile weed! When Gibbon toiled and smoked and thought over the "Decline and Fall,” in his little garden at Lausanne-when he penned the last line of that remarkable work, and looked out upon the calm lake --he little thought how the labours of future historians would be simplified by the discoveries of science. Even his prophetic eye could scarcely have penetrated to the time when the philosopher, instead .of looking to the passions of men working through ages as the causes of the decay of peoples, should seek for them in the narrow compass of the pipe he haply smoked! Mr. Lizars is undoubtedly entitled to the thanks of all future slaves of the lamp for so grand a discovery. Nevertheless, we must remind him that nations were just as apt to degenerate in the patriarchal times, before tobacco-smoke was known, as now-a-days.

Tobacco, according to Mr. Lizars, having slain so many nations in the Old World, he anticipates a new victim in the West: at least, he quotes with approval an extract from the Spectator, in which the Yankees are described as "undergoing a process of physical and moral degeneracy ;" and further, that "the people are like medlars-rotten before they are ripe "-principally in consequence of " smoking and chewing tobacco to excess." Now, we always imagined that

the defect of the Anglo-American character was an extravagant go-aheadism—an uncontrollable energy which would stop at nothing. If this effect is caused by tobacco-smoking, we should like to be informed by Mr. Lizars how the same weed can have the effect of steeping the Turk in apathy and idleness! The narcotic must be affected by longitude in some very remarkable manner, which we should like to hear explained.

Mr. Lizars having desolated and overthrown empires with a whiff of smoke in this remarkable manner, we expected to find a fitting figure for his grim landscape. Here he is a monster such as Frankenstein never could have imagined :

I once travelled with a gentleman from South America, who first filled his nostrils with snuff, which he prevented from falling out by stuffing shag tobacco after it, and this he termed "plugging ;" then put in each cheek a coil of pigtail tobacco, which he named "quidding,""-in this country called "chewing;" lastly, he lit a Havannah cigar, which he put into his mouth—and thus smoked and chewed, puffing at one time the smoke of the cigar, and at another time squirting the juice from his mouth, as so graphically described by Dickens in the boat story, on its way to the Far West. This gentleman was as thin as a razor, with an olivecoloured countenance, and frightfully nervous.

What a creature! Imagine shag tobacco hanging from his nostrils as long as the King of Sardinia's moustaches! But this, the reader will say, is simply an allowable exaggeration, in keeping with the previous picture. Not a bit of it. Here are his own consecutive remarks upon it :

The preceding is neither a caricature nor an exaggerated account of the fearful extent to which the use of tobacco is carried, not

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