GROG AND TOBACCO.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3158, 17 May 1883, Page 2

GROG AND TOBACCO.

(“ Pall Mall Gazette.’’) What is the real influence of wine and cigars, gin and tobacco, stimnlants and narcotics, upon the brain ? Do they give increased strength, greater lucidity of mind, and more continuous power ? Do they weaken and cloud the intellect ? Is a man’s intellectual strength hindered or helped by their use? These are the questions to which a practical inquirer has been endeavoring to find some satisfactory answer. And be has evidently taken much trouble about his work. He has addressed his inquiries to men of letters, novelists, essayists, journalists, men of science, statesmen, in England, Prance, Germany and America. Their replies he has embodied in a volume of 200 pages (“Study and Stimulants," by A. A. Reade ; published by A. Heywood and Sons). Altogether some one hundred and twenty-four answers have been received to his appeal, and in many cases the writers havjj not only replied to the direct questions, “ Do you smoke ?’’ “Do you drink ?’’ but have given many details of their everyday habits, which add much to the interest of the collection.

Twenty-five use wine at dinner only; thirty are abstainers from all alcoholic liquors; twenty-four use tobacco. Of these twenty-four only twelve smoke while at work ; Mr Edison chews, and Darwin took snuff. One or two find alcohol “ useful at a pinch.” “Not one resorts to alcohol” for inspiration. Mr Gladstone “detests" smoking, though ho finds wine is necessary to him at the time of greatest intellectual exertion. He drinks one or two glasses of claret at luncheon, the same at dinner, with the addition of a glass of light port.

Out of twenty men of science only two smoke. Professor Boyd Dawkins finds quinine the best stimulant. Edison invariably chews tobacco when at work, smoking he thinks too violent in its action. Night, he fancies, is the best time for intellectual work. * * ■* o o *

Of all people in the world one might fairly expect to find the traveller and the newspaper correspondent in the ranks of smokers. Dr W. H. Russell, for instance, has smoked and taken wine for years., Mr O’Donovan gives some very strong evidence in favor of stimulants, and draws a picture of his arrival in some wretched mud-built town, where he has laid down in some miserable hove] worn ont with fatigue and anxiety. But the newspaper letter had to be written. It was then that he found stimulan ts give him energy to unpack his writing materials, lie on his face, and propped on both elbows to write for hours by the light of a smoky lamp.” Mr Hcnty finds it difficult to write without smoking. Mr Sala has been a constant smoker for nearly forty years, but “ as to smoking stupifying a man’s faculties or blunting his energy, that allegation I take to be mainly nonsense.” * * * * * *

The “ student ” will probably think out the problem for himself, but he might do worse than consult Mr Reade’s curious collection, and think over the words of Wendell Holmes—“ I do not advise you, young man, to consecrate the flower of your youth to painting the bowl of a pipe, for, let me assure you, the stain of 'a reverie-breeding narcotic may strike deeper than, you think. I have seen the green leaf of early promise grow brown before • its time under such nicotian regimen, and thought the brown ambered meerschaum was dearly bought, at the cost of a brain enfeebled and a will enslaved.”