This gentleman, who is personally one of the most delightful old souls in the world, actually completed his lecture without ever once citing a scientific authority, without once grounding upon irrefutable scientific fact and without departing widely from the most trivial and childish sort of argument from analogy. Thus he stated that a famous war hero did not smoke. Wilson did not smoke. Hughes does not smoke. The inmates of reform schools all smoke. Smokers are physically and mentally unsafe! This may all be true for all I can prove to the contrary, but what of it? Many war heroes smoke. Grant certainly did. Small, defective and generally backward children normally spring from parents who underfeed them, who are themselves defective in heredity and who neglect to instruct their children in any essential matters. Can you prove that smoking alone either stunted them or put them in the reform school? You cannot. Criminals are predominantly religious according to their professions of faith. Did Christianity make them criminals? If smokers are mentally unsafe may I fervently declaim--God help research! You hear it said that the children of smoking mothers are inferior. Are they? How can it be proven? As a matter of fact no scientific experiment could possibly be carried on to prove this, for statistics, being riddled by all sorts of idiosyncrasies and unknowns, are grossly unscientific. To prove it you might have the same mother have two children at separate times by the same father, smoking while she bore one and abstaining for the control child. But that would prove nothing. Each child is a unique individual arising from a unique chromosome mixture. The mother and father would of necessity be older in the one case than in the other. Nourishment and other environmental conditions would inevitably vary. The experiment is impossible. Yet until such an experiment becomes possible we are merely voicing opinions when we say that smoking causes inferior children. The actual cause may be any of a thousand other and extraneous factors. When you consider how very often tobacco smoking is mentioned therapeutically and how universally it seems to be assumed that it is deleterious to health it is rather disconcerting to discover so little reliable scientific work to confirm this prevalent viewpoint. In fact practically no comprehensive, systematic work has been done by scientific research to prove that smoking is exceedingly harmful to the human system. Like so many other human preconceptions this assumption rests largely upon faith. To the acutely prejudiced non-smokers smoking seems so utterly perverse that it surely must be physically injurious.