More Slow Poisoning.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 8, 20 February 1902, Page 18

More Slow Poisoning.

The Elmer poisoning case was a rather slow one. But a slower still is mentioned in the course of Chatfco's ourious Paper of Tobacco

He tells how, Bomewhere in the late seventies, there was still living at Hildhausen (Silesia) a somewhat elderly man who had seen 142 summers, and who had from his teens up to that time regularly puffed away one or two pipes of tobacco every day. A curiou 8 volume in our possession tella how one Jane Garbutt died at Well"oury in Yorkshire, at the uncomfortably old age of 110, and sucked (away at a clay pipe to the end. Hobbes, Dr. Parr, Izaak Walton, and Dr. Barrow all passed three score and ten. Among the literary devotees of the weed were Milton, Lord Byron, Paley, Carlyle, Charles Lamb, Dickens .Thackeray, Tennyson, and Guizot. Ruskin poured forth a splendid torrent of scorn on those who ' pollute the pure air of the morning with cigar-smoke.' Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the genial ' Autocrat,' warns young men that ' the stain of a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than you think for I have seen,' he adds, ' the green leaf of early promise grow brown before its time under such nicotian regimen, and thought the ambered meerschaum was deeply bought at the cost of a brain en. feebled and a will enslaved .' According to all medical testimony, the connection between tobacco-smoke and longevity is at best an occasional and accidental one. Holland holds the record for tobacco-puffing, the annual consumption of the weed exceeding 71bs per head of the populationThey are at the same time the cleanliest people in Europe — washing everything (as Tom Hood remarked) except the water. And yet the average duration of life in Holland is about the lowest in Europe. The ruinous effects of cigarette smoking have manifested themselves to such an extent in the United States that, up to about 1891, about three legislatures out of every four in the country had passed Acts making smoking by youths a punishable offence. In our own country many youths — to use the well known phrase of Charles Lamb — toil to acquire the injurious practice 'as some men t-t-toil after virtue.' A prohibitive Act on the lines of those in force in America would be a boon to New Zealand. Why was the Bill dealing with the matter abandoned during the last session ?