A good deal of excitement was produced lately in an Ohio village, when an old and reverend deacon in the church, a model in good words and works, was attacked with what appeared to be delirium tremens. The attack was renewed again and again, and finally the deacon died.
The disease really was, as stated by the physicians, similar to mania-a-potu, but had been produced by the excessive use of tobacco, which had slowly but thoroughly penetrated his nervous system.
The superintendent of the Pennsylvania Insane Hospital, in his last annual report, states that he has carefully tabulated for many years the causes of insanity in his patients, and finds intemperance the highest on the list. First, intemperance in the use of liquor, secondly, of tobacco, and thirdly, of opium and chloral.
"The earlier in life," he says, "that boys begin to use tobacco, the more strongly marked are its effects upon the nerves and brain.
"Statistics obtained from European schools show that lads whose standing had been good in their classes before they began to smoke or chew, were invariably found, after they became addicted to either habit, to fall below the school average."
If young men would at least refrain from the use of tobacco until after the age of twenty-five, they would probably never acquire the habit of using it; or, if they did, it would not gain so secure or deadly a hold upon them, because their constitutions would be better able to resist it.
There is no temptation to young girls in tobacco, but the use of narcotics, anodynes, "drops" and chloral, to which many woman are becoming addicted, is even more perilous to body and mind.
IN PRISON.
Charles Langheimer, a white-haired old German, of seventy years of age, presented himself, a few weeks ago, at the door of the Eastern Penitentiary, in Pennsylvania, and asked to be given a cell in charity, and allowed to end his days there.