It is also gratifying to learn that our forefathers, in whose wisdom all right-minded people, of course, fondly believe, were not wholly wrong in their estimate of the manifold virtues of their beloved herb. With the largeness of faith which belongs equally to the infancy of research and the springtime of life, they believed with the implicit faith of childhood in its all-healing powers. And the learned in the secrets of Nature proclaimed to suffering humanity that out of the heart of the New World had come a remedy for all the ills that flesh is heir to. But if facts grew too strong for faith to grapple with, and overthrew their Dagon, this one consolation remains to testify to their just appreciation of the weed, namely, that it can, and does, destroy contagious germs. Early in the seventeenth century, physicians at home and abroad had observed a connection between the use of tobacco and freedom from the dread pestilence which at times swept over the land. Doctors Gardiner and Lewis, Thorius and Diemerbroeck, Hoffman and Willis have left records of their experience of cases where tobacco proved to be efficacious, administered either in fume or liquor, lotions or unguents. No doubt their treatment was somewhat crude, and their concoctions (marvels of simplicity) were not always successful, and, needless to say, that modern therapeutics takes no account of their remedies. But their discovery that tobacco was destructive of insect life on animals as well as on vegetables, that it cleansed old wounds and sores and suffered them to heal ‘comfortably,’ surely redeems them from a multitude of sins committed in the name of tobacco.