WHEN a distinguished man sinks into his grave, from the midst of many rivals in a common race, the strife of opinions in reference to him is instantaneously allayed; personal feelings, if not quenched, are repressed and hushed; and, like the heroism of the triumphant warrior, when he is caught by the anxious eye emerging unscathed from the battle and the smoke, his merits appear now unclouded and confessed. Such, we believe, is the general feeling among the members of his own profession in regard to the author of the valuable work now before us. Snatched suddenly from the midst of his labours, before the third edition of his Materia Medica was completed, there are few in any way familiar with the subject who will not regret the sudden extinction of so much learning, and, apart from all private considerations, that the world should have so prematurely lost the benefits of his ripening judgment and experience, and the results of his extended reading and research. Yet how many precious cabinets of collected knowledge do we see thus hurriedly sealed up for ever! How often, when a man appears to have reached that condition of mental culture and accumulated information, in which he is fitted to do the most for

the advancement of learning, or for promoting the material comfort of his fellows, how often does the cold hand suddenly and mysteriously paralyse and stop him! He has been permitted to add only a small burden of earth to the rising mound of intellectual elevation, scarcely enough to signify to aftercomers that his hand has laboured at the work. Nevertheless, he may have shown a new way of advancing, in some sense, so that to others the toil is easier and the progress faster, because he has gone before. The more, however, the true-hearted worker in the cause of progressive science becomes familiar with its actual condition and its great future, the more he becomes satisfied also of the vanity of attempting to associate with an individual name the merit of this or that advance-the more earnestly he trains himself to find the best reward for individual attempts in the growing conquests and dimensions of the field he cultivates, and in the consciousness that he has not been unhelpful in widening its domain. Such a consciousness Dr Pereira might well entertain, and we trust he found in it something to alleviate the regrets the best of us naturally feel, when compelled to leave a favourite task unfinished.

By JONATHAN PEREIRA,

VOL. LXXIV.-NO. CCCCLIV.

I

We should be forsaking widely the field we usually occupy, were we to attempt to lay before our readers any analysis of a work so elaborate and so purely professional as this of Dr Pereira. We propose, however, to take it as our text-book, in considering a subject of great general interest -one scarcely of more importance to the professional physician than it is to the physiologist, the psychologist, and the economical statist. The book is replete with scattered information on the subject of the Narcotics we Indulge in, and some of this we propose to bring together in the present article. And among other sources from which we mean to draw the materials necessary to our purpose, are the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, long, long ago noticed in our pages, but, to us who have been reading it to-day, as fresh and new as ever-as full of interest, as suggestive of profound reflection. We who are ourselves somewhat scientific, can scarce restrain a selfish sigh when we think how fresh and new, how sure of human sympathy this actual burning experience of a living man will continue to be when the heavy and toilsome tomes of Pereira shall have become mere records of the progress of science, and be turned up only to illustrate the ignorance of the most learned or trusted in their professions about the middle of the nineteenth century.

In ministering fully to his natural wants, man passes through three successive stages. First, the necessities of his material existence are provided for; next, his cares are assuaged and for the time banished; and lastly, his enjoyments, intellectual and animal, are multiplied and for the time exalted. Beef and bread represent the means by which, in every country, the first end is attained; fermented liquors help us to the second; and the third we reach by the aid of narcotics.

When we examine, in a chemical sense, the animal and vegetable productions which in a thousand varied forms, among various nations, take the place of the beef and pudding of the Englishman in supplying the first necessities of our nature, we are struck with the remarkable general similarity which prevails among them naturally, or which they are made to assume by

the artifices of cookery, before they are conveyed into the stomach. And we exclaim, in irrepressible wonder, "by what universal instinct is it that, under so many varied conditions of climate and of natural vegetation, the experience of man has led him everywhere so nicely to adjust the chemical constitution of the staple forms of his diet to the chemical wants of his living body?"

Nor is the lightening of care less widely and extensively attained. Savage and civilised tribes, near and remote-the houseless barbarian wanderer, the settled peasant, and the skilled citizen-all have found, without intercommunion, through some common and instinctive process, the art of preparing fermented drinks, and of procuring for themselves the enjoyments and miseries of intoxication. The juice of the cocoa-nut tree yields its toddy wherever this valuable palm can be made to grow. Another palm affords a fermented wine on the Andean slopes of Chili-the sugar palm intoxicates in the Indian Archipelago, and among the Moluccas and Philippines-while the best palm wine of all is prepared from the sap of the oilpalms of the African coast. In Mexico the American aloe (Agave Americana) gave its much-loved pulque, and probably also its ardent brandy, long before Cortez invaded the ancient monarchy of the Aztecs. Fruits supply the cider, the perry and the wine, of many civilised regions-barley and the cereal grains the beer and brandy of others; while the milk of their breeding mares supplies at will to the wandering Tartar, either a mild exhilarating drink, or an ardently intoxicating spirit. And to our wonder at the wide prevalence of this taste, and our surprise at the success with which, in so many different ways, mankind has been able to gratify it, the chemist adds a new wonder and surprise when he tells us, that as in the case of his food, so in preparing his intoxicating drinks, man everywhere come to the same result. His fermented liquors, wherever and from whatever substances prepared, all contain the same exciting alcohol, producing everywhere, upon every human being, the same exhilarating effects!

has

It is somewhat different as regards the next stage of human wants—the exalted stage which we arrive at by the aid of narcotics. Of these narcotics, it is remarkable that almost every country or tribe has its own-either aboriginal or imported-so that the universal instinct has led somehow or other to the universal supply of this want also.

The aborigines of Central America rolled up the tobacco leaf, and dreamed away their lives in smoky reveries, ages before Columbus was born, or the colonists of Sir Walter Raleigh brought it within the chaste precincts of the Elizabethan court. The coca leaf, now the comfort and strength of the Peruvian muletero, was chewed as he does it, in far remote times, and among the same mountains, by the Indian natives whose blood he inherits. The use of opium and hemp, and the betel nut, among eastern Asiatics, mounts up to the times of most fabulous antiquity, as probably does that of the pepper tribe in the South Sea Islands and the Indian archipelago; while in northern Europe the hop, and in Tartary the narcotic fungus, have been in use from time immemorial. In all these countries the wished-for end has been attained, as in the case of intoxicating drinks, by different means; but the precise effect upon the system, by the use of each substance, has not, in this case, been the same. On the contrary, tobacco, and coca, and opium, and hemp, and the hop, and Cocculus indicus, and the toadstool, each exercise an influence upon the human frame, which is peculiar to itself, and which in many respects is full of interest, and deserving of profound study. These differences we so far know to arise from the active substances they severally contain being chemically different.

I. TOBACCO. Of all the narcotics we have mentioned, tobacco is in use over the largest area, and by the greatest number of people. Opium comes next to it; and the hemp plant occupies the third place.

The tobacco plant is indigenous to tropical America, whence it was introduced into Spain and France in the beginning of the sixteenth century by

the Spaniards, and into England half a century later (1586) by Sir Francis Drake. Since that time, both the use and the cultivation of the plant have spread over a large portion of the globe. Besides the different parts of America, including Canada, New Brunswick, the United States, Mexico, the Western coast, the Spanish main, Brazil, Cuba, St Domingo, Trinidad, &c., it has spread in the East into Turkey, Persia, India, China, Australia, the Philippine Islands, and Japan. It has been raised with success also in nearly every country of Europe; while in Africa it is cultivated in Egypt, Algeria, in the Canaries, on the Western coast, and at the Cape of Good Hope. It is, indeed, among narcotics, what the potato is among food-plants-the most extensively cultivated, the most hardy, and the most tolerant of changes in temperature, altitude, and general climate.

In

We need scarcely remark, that the use of the plant has become not less universal than its cultivation. America it is met with everywhere, and the consumption is enormous. In Europe, from the plains of sunny Castile to the frozen Archangel, the pipe and the cigar are a common solace among all ranks and conditions. In vain was the use of it prohibited in Russia, and the knout threatened for the first offence, and death for the second. In vain Pope Urban VIII. thundered out his bull against it. In vain our own James I. wrote his "Counterblaste to Tobacco." Opposition only excited more general attention to the plant, awakened curiosity regarding it, and promoted its consumption.

So in the East-the priests and sultans of Turkey and Persia declared smoking a sin against their holy religion, yet nevertheless the Turks and Persians became the greatest smokers in the world. In Turkey the pipe is perpetually in the mouth; in India all classes and both sexes smoke; in China the practice is so universal that "every female, from the age of eight or nine years, wears as an appendage to her dress a small silken pocket, to hold tobacco and a pipe." It is even argued by Pallas that the extensive prevalence of the practice in Asia, and especially in China,

proves the use of tobacco for smoking to be more ancient than the discovery of the New World. "Amongst the Chinese," he says, "and amongst the Mongol tribes who had the most intercourse with them, the custom of smoking is so general, so frequent, and has become so indispensable a luxury; the tobacco purse affixed to their belt so necessary an article of dress; the form of the pipes, from which the Dutch seem to have taken the model of theirs, so original; and, lastly, the preparation of the yellow leaves, which are merely rubbed to pieces and then put into the pipe, so peculiar that they could not possibly derive all this from America by way of Europe, especially as India, where the practice of smoking is not so general, intervenes between Persia and China." 11 *

Leaving this question of its origin, the reader will not be surprised, when he considers how widely the practice of smoking prevails, that the total produce of tobacco grown on the face of the globe has been calculated by Mr Crawfurd to amount to the enormous quantity of two millions of tons. The comparative magnitude of this quantity will strike the reader more forcibly, when we state that the whole of the wheat consumed by the inhabitants of Great Britain-estimating it at a quarter a-head, or in round numbers at twenty millions of quarters weighs only four and one-third millions of tons; so that the tobacco yearly raised for the gratification of this one form of the narcotic appetite weighs as much as the wheat consumed by ten millions of Englishmen. And reckoning it at only double the market value of wheat, or twopence and a fraction per pound, it is worth in money as much as all the wheat eaten in Great Britain.

The largest producers, and probably the largest consumers, of tobacco, are the United States of America. The annual production, at the last two decennial periods of their census returns, was estimated at

1840, 219,163,319 lb. 1850, 199,752,646 being about one-twentieth part of the whole supposed produce of the globe.

One of the remarkable circumstances connected with the history of tobacco is, the rapidity with which its growth and comsumption have increased, in almost every country, since the discovery of America. In 1662, the quantity raised in Virginia -the chief producer of tobacco on the American shores of the Atlantic -was only 60,000 lb.; and the quantity exported from that colony in 1689, only 120,000 lb. In two huudred and thirty years, the produce has risen to nearly twice as many millions. And the extension of its use in our own country may be inferred from the facts that, in the above year of 1689, the total importation was 120,000 lb. of Virginian tobacco, part of which was probably re-exported; while, in 1852, the quantity entered for home consumption amounted to

28,558,753 lb.

being something over a pound per head of the whole population; and to this must be added the large quantity of contraband tobacco, which the heavy duty of 3s. per I. tempts the smuggler to introduce. The whole duty levied on the above quantity in 1852, was £4,560,741, which is equal to a poll-tax of 3s. a head.

Tobacco, as every child among us now knows, is used for smoking, for chewing, and for snuffing. The second of these practices is, in many respects, the most disgusting, and is now rarely seen in this country, except among seafaring men. On shipboard, smoking is always dangerous, and often forbidden; while snuffing is expensive and inconvenient; so that, if the weed must be used, the practice of chewing it can alone be resorted to.

For the smoker and chewer it is prepared in various forms, and sold under different names. The dried leaves, coarsely broken, are sold as canaster or knaster. When moistened, compressed, and cut into fine threads, they form cut or shag tobacco. Moistened with molasses or with syrup, and pressed into cakes, they are called cavendish and negrohead, and are used indifferently either for chewing or smoking. Moistened