Similar investigations have been made in Spain and Germany. Werke saturated a cigar with a liquid fully impregnated with cholera bacilli and found that in twenty-four hours every germ was destroyed. He next placed bacilli upon dry tobacco leaves; in this case they were rendered harmless in half an hour. In other trials a contact with the leaf of three hours was required for their destruction. Strange to say, damp tobacco was the least effective; the germs struggled hard for existence, and held out for three days before yielding up their lives to the superior genius of the weed. A fifty per cent. solution of tobacco over-mastered them in twenty-four hours. But it is in burning tobacco, when its elements are liberated from their confinement, that the battle is most decisive. Werke says, that when he tested them with the smoke of tobacco every germ was rendered incapable of propagating disease in less than five minutes. Though the medical man whom duty calls to densely-crowded, unwholesome districts fortifies himself against attack from the invisible foe with a Manila or Cuban leaf, he protests emphatically against the smoking habit which has recently cropped up among boys. The boy-smoker, besides being a nuisance, is rendering himself physically and mentally unfit for the duties of life. CHAPTER VI ON THE ANTIQUITY OF TOBACCO-SMOKING Like Horace’s greybeard, we are all more or less prone to look lovingly towards the past, to regard the days of our forefathers as the good old times in which they played their part in life’s drama on a larger and nobler scale than we do, or are capable of doing. In this spirit of admiration for antiquity we see the beginnings of that hero-worship which with the Greeks gradually developed into their beautiful mythology. They, above all other people, delighted to extol the powers and achievements of their ancestors; they clothed them with the attributes of deity, and strove to emulate and honour them in all manly deeds; thus they exalted their own conceptions of life, and idealised the course of their national existence. And yet this innate tendency to magnify and extend into the dim, illimitable regions of antiquity whatever of human effort is deemed most worthy, is a source of difficulty to the conscientious student. Amid the wild growth of myth and marvel the antiquary or archæologist warily treads his way to surer ground, and out of scattered fragments of a by-gone age constructs anew an old order of existence, or opens a vista to the mind’s eye through which glimpses may be gained of the habits and inner life of our remote ancestors. Then it is we see the present linked with the past in one unbroken chain; our knowledge is enlarged, and we recognise the unity of our race. Needless then to say that it is in no narrow spirit of mere curiosity that the wise men of Europe have devoted much labour and learning to the task of discovering if the habit