Professor of Anatomy and Surgery in the Medical Institution of New Hampshire, at Dartmouth College; Professor of Surgery and Obstetrics in the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the Western District of the State of New York; President of the New Hampshire Medical Society; Fellow of the American Academy of Sciences; and Associate of the College of Physicians at Philadelphia.
BOSTON:
PUBLISHED BY PERKINS & MARVIN.
PHILADELPHIA: HENRY PERKINS.
1836.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1836,
By Perkins & Marvin,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts.
In the great kingdom of living nature, man is the only animal that seeksto poison or destroy his own instincts, to turn topsy-turvy the laws ofhis being, and to make himself as unlike, as possible, that which he wasobviously designed to be.
No satisfactory solution of this extraordinary propensity has beengiven, short of a reference to that—
"first disobedience and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world and all our wo,
With loss of Eden."
While the myriads of sentient beings, spread over the earth, adhere,with unyielding fidelity, to the laws of their several existences,man exerts his superior intellect in attempting to outwit nature,and to show that she has made an important mistake, in his own case.Not satisfied with the symmetry and elegance of form given him by hisCreator, he transforms himself into a hideous monster, or copies uponhis own[4] person, the proportions of some disgusting creature, far downin the scale of animal being. Not content with loving one thing andloathing another, he perseveres in his attempts to make bitter sweet,and sweet bitter, till nothing but the shadow is left, of his primitiverelishes and aversions. This is strikingly exemplified in the habitualuse of the narcotic or poisonous vegetables.
Tobacco is generally regarded as having originated in America. Its nameappears to have been derived from Tabaco, a province of Yucatan, inMexico, from which place it is said to have been first sent to Spain;or, as some assert, though with less probability, from an instrumentnamed Tabaco, employed in Hispaniola in smoking this article.
Cortez sent a specimen of it to the king of Spain in 1519. Sir FrancisDrake is said to have introduced it into England about the year 1560,and, not far front the same time, John Nicot carried it to France; and