The repugnance and nausea which greet the smoker, in his first attempts to use tobacco, are not a stronger argument against it than the fact that the system so soon becomes habituated to these effects is a proof of its essential innocuousness.
Certainly the love of tobacco is not an instinctive appetite, like that for nitrogen and carbon in the form of food. Man was not born with a cigar in his mouth, and it is not certain that the Nicotiana tabacum flourished in the Garden of Eden. But history proves the existence of an instinct among all races—call it depraved, if you will, the fact remains—leading them to employ narcotics. And narcotics all nations have sought and found. We venture to affirm that tobacco is harmless as any. The betel and the hop can alone compare with it in this respect; and the hop is not a narcotic which satisfies alone; others are used with it. Opium and Indian hemp are not to be mentioned in comparison; while coca, in excess, is much more hurtful.
Tobacco may more properly be called a sedative than a narcotic. Opium, the type of the latter class, is in its primary action excitant, but secondarily narcotic. The opium-eaters are familiar with this, and learn by experience to regulate the dose so as to prolong the first and shorten the second effects, as much as possible.
Tobacco, on the other hand, is primarily sedative and relaxing. A high authority says of its physiological action:—
"First, That its greater and first effect is to assuage and allay and soothe the system in general.
"Second, That its lesser and second, or after effect, is to excite and invigorate, and at the same time give steadiness and fixity to the powers of thought."
Either of these effects will predominate, we conceive, according to the intellectual state and capacity of the individual, as well as in accordance with the amount used.
The dreamy Oriental is sunk into deeper reverie under the influence of tobacco, and his happiness while smoking seems to consist in thinking of nothing. The studious German, on the contrary, "thinks and dreams, and dreams and thinks, alternately; but while his body is soothed and stilled, his mind is ever awake."
This latter description resembles, to compare small things with great, the effects of opium, as detailed by De Quincey.
"In habitual smokers," says Pereira, "the practice, when moderately indulged, produces that remarkably soothing and tranquillizing effect on the mind which has caused it to be so much admired and adopted by all classes of society."