Year: 1879

The toxicants have variation of action
in their early stages. Alcohols excite
the mind and quicken the pulses before
they depress. Opium excites before it
depresses. Tobacco does not in the
strict sense excite, but depresses and
soothes from the first, so that there are
stages, which some persons always feel,
when alcohol is antidotal to tobacco.
Among those persons who are total alb
stainers from alcohol few are found who
can bear tobacco in the most moderate
use of it. Under tobacco the heart
seems rapidly to run down in power,
and alcohol is called for to whip it up
again, also as it seems. The fact is,
that the heart is not the organ primarily
concerned at all, but the minute vessels
at the termination of the arterial circuit.
These minute vessels are under nervous
influence by which the passage of blood
through them is regulated, and which
influence is readily modified by very re-
fined causes acting through the organic
or emotional nervous centers. The
effect of tobacco on these minute YES
sells, through the nervous system, is to
cause contraction of them as primary
fact, so that the face of the person af-
fected becomes pale and the surface of
the body cold, while the heart labors to
force on the supply of blood until its
own vascular system comes under the
influence then the stomach involuntarily
contracts, and, after time, the voluntary
muscles, deprived of blood, convulse
TREMENDOUSLY, or pass into active convul-
sions, as in tetanus. Alcohol, on the
other hand, through its influence on
nervous functions, relaxes the vessels OF
the minute circulation, sets free the heart,
reduces the muscular power, and in
every particular counteracts the tobac-
CO. When q person receives stun, or
is shocked by some intelligence, or sight,
or sound, that thereby stuns him, so
that, like Hamlet, he is bechiiied


Almost to Jelly by the act of feat.


he is for the moment in the same state
as the man who first tries to smoke to-
bacco, and who, with pallied face, cold
surface, and reeling brain, is to his sense
and feeling stricken with all but mortal
suffering and prostration. In each OF
these cases alcohol, for moment, acts
as an antidote not necessarily as the best
antidote, but as a fair one. When,
therefore, we see man smoking and
drinking, quafing off the cup of wine
or spirit 20 quiet the qualm which would
otherwise be inflicted by the fumes of
the cigar or the pipe, we really observe
the facts of most excellently though
innocently devised physiological expert
ment on a living animal. The man.
unconsciously to his knowledge, if not
to his sensation-unless he be q physi-
ologist-is inducing a balance in the
tension of his arterial circuit.


In process of time the nervous sys-
tenn, becoming accustomed to these in
fluences, one or both, in certain de-
gree tolerates them, for period. The
tolerance while it lasts is an advantage
to the habit, and, if the habit were
necessity, it would be blessing. But
the advantage is not permanent. In
the end the nutrition Of the organic
parts which are under the influence of
the same nervous regulation is sure to
suffer, and in many organizations to
suffer rapidly and fatally Richard
son, in Contemporary ReUieaD.