CIGARETTE SMOKING.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3523, 23 October 1882, Page 4

CIGARETTE SMOKING.

The Lancet, ■winch has been writing lately on the injurious habit of taking ' nips' of alcohol between meals, remarks that scarcely less injurious, in a subtle and generally unrecognised way, is the growing practice of smoking cigarettes incessantly. It has not a word to say against smoking at suitable times and in moderation, nor do the remarks apply to the use of cigars or pipes. It is against the habit of smoking cigarettes in large quantities, with the belief that these miniature dosea of nicotine are innocuous. The truth is that, perhaps owing to the way the tobacco-leaf is shredded, coupled with the fact thst it is brought into more direct relation with the mouth and air-passages than when it is smoked in a pipe or cigar, the effects produced on the nervous system by a free consumption of cigarettes are more marked and characteristic than those recognisable after recourse to other modes of smoking. A pulse-tracing made after the subject lms smoked say a dozen cigarettes will, as a rule, be flatter and more indicative of depression than one taken after the smoking of cigars. It is no uncommon practice for youug men who smoke cigarettes habitually to consume from eight to twelve in an hour, and to keep this up for four or five hours daily. The total quantity of tobacco used may not eeem large, but beyond question the volume of smoke to which the breath organs of the smoker are exposed, and tbe characteristics of that smoke as regards the proportion of nicotine introduced into the sv?tem, combine to place the organism very "fully under the influence of the tobacco. To youths and young men who have not completed the full term of their physical development the habit of cigarette-smoking, as of any smoking, is tnost baneful. Health is, in many cases, utterly nndermined by it, and they do not attain full physical life. These little whiffs do and are doing infinite harm, where no mischief is suspected.