The limits of our article will not allow us to embrace all the considerations which belong to this subject, and which 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 of a polypus which closed up the stomach, the formation of which was attributed to the excessive use of snuff. Some portion of the snuff will involuntarily find its way into the stomach, where its pernicious properties soon manifest themselves, being frequently followed by nausea, vomitings, loss of appetite, and impaired digestion. The drain of the juices has a tendency to injure the muscles of the face, to render them flaccid, to furrow and corrugate the skin, and to give a gaunt, withered, and jaundiced appearance to "the human face divine."
We are also informed that it embrowns the complexion, by withdrawing those peculiar secretions which communicate the fine vermillion hue of beauty. In our country, however, women do not abandon themselves to this impure habit, till they are married, and have no farther desire to please, or till they are somewhat passées, and find their faculties of pleasing impaired. What a death-blow does snuffing give to all that romance with which it is the interest of refined society to invest the fair sex! How vulgar the thought "that a sneeze should interrupt a sigh!"—How unpoetical is snuff! The most suitable verses which a lover could address to a snuff-taking mistress, would be imitations of Horace's lines to the Sorceress Canidia. What sylph would superintend the conveyance of this dust to the nostrils of a belle? What Gnome would not take a fiendish delight in hovering over a pipe-loving beauty?
"The only advantage," says Dr. Leake, "of taking snuff, is that of sneezing, which, in sluggish phlegmatic habits, will give universal concussion to the body, and promote a more free circulation of the blood; but of this benefit snuff-takers are deprived, from being familiar with its use." When the stimulus of snuff ceases to be sufficient, recourse is immediately had to certain admixtures, by which the necessary excitement is procured; thus pepper, euphorbium, hellebore, and even pulverised glass, are made use of to give it additional pungency. Snuffing is also a frequent cause of blindness. Nature has appointed certain fluids to nourish and preserve the eye, which, if withdrawn, cause the sight to become prematurely old, impaired by weakness, and sometimes totally destroyed. We are also told that it dries up and blackens the brain, and gives the stomach a yellow hue;[68] that it injures the moral faculties, impairs the memory, and, indeed, debilitates all the intellectual powers, and that it taints the breath "with the rank odour of a tobacco cask." "We read in the Ephemerides des Curieux de la Nature, that a person fell into a state of somnolency, and died apoplectic, in consequence of having taken by the nose too great a quantity of snuff."[69] In fine, snuffing is said to bring on convulsions, promote pulmonary consumption, and to cause madness and death! Napoleon is thought to have owed his death to a morbid state of stomach, superinduced by snuffing to excess. Dr. Rush relates that Sir John Pringle was afflicted with tremors in his hands, and had his memory impaired by the use of snuff; when, on abandoning the habit, at the instance of Dr. Franklin, he found his power of recollection restored, and he recovered the use of his hands.[70]
When the habit of snuffing is once contracted, it becomes almost impossible to divest ourselves of it. It becomes as necessary as food, or any of those first wants of life "quibus negatis natura doleat." The following story we translate from a French medical writer:—
"I recollect, about twenty years since, while gathering simples one day in the Forest of Fontainebleau, I encountered a man stretched out upon the ground; I supposed him to be dead, when, upon approaching, he asked in a feeble voice if I had some snuff; on my replying in the negative, he sunk back immediately, almost in a state of insensibility. In this condition he remained till I brought a person who gave him several pinches, and he then informed us that he had commenced his journey that morning, supposing he had his snuff-box with him, but found very soon he had started without it; that he had travelled as long as he was able, till at last, overcome by distress, he found it impossible to proceed any farther, and without my timely succour he would have certainly perished."[71]
The consumption of time and great expense of this artificial habit, almost surpass belief. "A man who takes a pinch of snuff every twenty minutes," says Dr. Rush, "(which most habitual snuffers do), and snuffs fifteen hours in four-and-twenty, (allowing him to consume not quite half a minute every time he uses the box,) will waste about five whole days of every year of his life in this useless and unwholesome practice. But when we add to the profitable use to which this time might have been applied, the expenses of tobacco, pipes, snuff, and spitting boxes—and of the injuries which are done to the clothing, during a whole life, the aggregate sum would probably amount to several hundred dollars. To a labouring man this would be a decent portion for a son or daughter, while the same sum saved by a man in affluent circumstances, would have enabled him, by a contribution to a public charity, to have lessened a large portion of the ignorance or misery of mankind." But Lord Stanhope makes a far more liberal estimate than Dr. Rush; "Every professed, inveterate, and incurable snuff-taker," says he, "at a moderate computation, takes one pinch in ten minutes. Every pinch, with the agreeable ceremony of blowing and wiping the nose, and other incidental circumstances, consumes a minute and a half. One minute and a half out of every ten, allowing sixteen hours to a snuff-taking day, amounts to two hours and twenty-four minutes out of every natural day, or one day of every ten. One day out of ten amounts to thirty six days and a half in a year. Hence, if we suppose the practice to be persisted in forty years, two entire years of the snuff-taker's life will be devoted to tickling his nose, and two more to blowing it." The same author proposes in a subsequent essay to show, that from the expense of snuff, snuff-boxes, and handkerchiefs, a fund might be formed to pay off the English National debt!
The subject of snuffing having employed more of our time than we anticipated, the two following heads of smoking and chewing will be more briefly noticed. On the subject of smoking, Mr. Beloe has preserved the following old epigram.[72]
"We buy the dryest wood that we can finde,
And willingly would leave the smoke behinde:
But in tobacco a thwart course we take
Buying the herb only for the smoke's sake."
Smoking was the earliest mode of using tobacco,[73] (as might be inferred from the epigram) and for a long time the only mode in which it was used in Europe. Certainly in our day it is the most general, and at the same time the most expensive, and although several rivals contend with Sir Walter Ralegh for the praise of having introduced tobacco into England, yet the "bright honour" of having taught his countrymen to imitate the Indians, in this particular, he "wears without corrival." Almost all the arguments which have been employed against the use of tobacco as a sternutatory, are more or less applicable to it when used in the way of fumigation.[74] Good old Cotton Mather, who was fully aware of the disadvantages as well as sinfulness of this habit, deprecates it with a qualification at which it is impossible to repress a smile. It savours so much of "beating the Devil round a bush." Thus he says—"May God preserve me from the indecent, ignoble, criminal slavery, to the mean delight of smoking a weed, which I see so many carried away with. And if ever I should smoke it, let me be so wise as to do it, not only with moderation, but also with such employment of my mind, as I may make that action afford me a leisure for!"[75]