scientific inferences; and if they are to be overturned, it must be by scientific argument. They are not to be shaken by all of Mr. Parton's clamour about the Coming Man, and people who keep themselves "well-groomed," and ladies who write for the press. So far as our present knowledge of physiology goes for anything, it thus goes to exhibit tobacco, rightly used, as the great economizer of vital force, the aider of nervous co-ordination, and one of the ablest co-workers in normal and vigorous nutrition. And, as we have said before, it is the difference in the rate of nutrition which is probably the most fundamental difference between strength and feebleness, vigour and sluggishness, health and disease. It was because of rapid nutrition that Napoleon and Humboldt performed their prodigious tasks, and yet needed almost incredibly little sleep. It is the difference between fast and slow nutrition which makes one soldier's wound heal, while another's gangrenes; which enables one young girl to throw off a chest-cold with ease, while another is dragged into the grave by it. Waste and repair—these are the essential correlatives; and the agent which checks the former while hastening the latter can hardly be other than a friend to health, long life, and vigour.

We conclude with an inductive argument which an eminent physician has recently in conversation urged upon our attention. Throughout the whole world, probably nine men out of every ten use tobacco.[31] Throughout the civilized world, women, as a general rule, abstain from the use of tobacco. Here we have an experiment, on an immense scale, ready-made for us. These three hundred million civilized men and women are subjected to the same varieties of climatic, dietetic, and social influences; their environments are the same; their inherited organic proclivities will average about the same; but the men smoke and the women do not. Now, if all that our hygienic reformers say about tobacco were true, the men in civilized countries should be afflicted with numerous constitutional diseases which do not afflict the women; or should be more liable to the diseases common to the two sexes; or, finally, should be shorter lived than the women. But statistics show that men are, on the whole, just as healthy and long-lived as women. In point of the average number of diseases[32] to which they are subject; in point of liability to disease; and in point of longevity; the two sexes are in all civilized countries, exactly on a par with each other. During the two hundred years in which tobacco has been in common use, it has made no appreciable difference in the health or longevity of those who have used it. This is a rough experiment, in which no account is taken of dosage, and in which the results are only general averages. But to our mind, it is very significant. Taken alone, it shows conclusively that since tobacco first began to be used, its bad effects must have been at least fully balanced by its good effects. Taken in connection with our physiological argument, it shows quite conclusively that the current notion about the banefulness of tobacco is, as we remarked above, simply a popular delusion.