Also Dr. Madden:——“The debility, both moral and physical, attendant on the excitement produced by opium is terrible; the appetite is soon destroyed, every fibre in the body trembles, the nerves of the neck become affected, and the muscles get rigid. Several of these I have seen in this place at various times, who had wry necks and contracted fingers, but still they cannot abandon the custom; they are miserable until the hour arrives for taking their daily dose; and when its delightful influence begins, they are all fire and animation.” A native literati of Hong-Kong affirms, “that from the robust who smoke, flesh is gradually consumed and worn away, and their skin hangs down like bags; the faces of the weak who smoke are cadaverous and black, and their bones naked as billets of wood.” Also Dr. Oxley of Singapore:——“The inordinate use of the drug most decidedly does bring on early decrepitude, destructive of certain powers connected with the increase of the species, and a morbid state of all the secretions. But I have seen a man who had used the drug for fifty years in moderation without evil effects, and one I recollect in Malacca who had so used it was upwards of eighty. Several in the habit of smoking assured me, that in moderation, it neither impaired the functions nor shortened life, at the same time they fully admitted the deleterious effects of too much.” Dr. Little visited on one occasion an opium shop, and found there two women smoking the drug—one had been a smoker for ten years. “In the morning when she awakes she says, ‘I feel as one dead. I cannot do anything until the pipe is consumed. My eyelids are glazed so that they cannot be opened, my nose discharges profusely. I feel a tightness in the chest, with sense of suffocation. My bones are sore, my head aches and is giddy, and I loathe the very sight of food.’ Within an hour I could produce a thousand of those creatures; and if I stood at the door of an opium shop, and watched those that entered, out of the hundred would be found at least seventy-five or eighty whose appearance would not require the confession that their health was destroyed, and their mind weakened, since the day that they were cursed with the first taste of an opium-pipe. To finish this subject let me record my opinion, the result of extensive investigation. That the habitual use of opium not only renders the life of the man miserable, but is a powerful means of shortening that life.”