Chapter I: Front Matter (1)

BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
NO. CCCCLIV. AUGUST, 1853. VOL. LXXIV.

CONTENTS.

THE NARCOTICS WE INDULGE IN, 129
SOUTH AMERICAN TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE, 140
NAPOLEON AND SIR HUDSON LOWE, 159
NEW READINGS IN SHAKESPEARE, 181
THE INSURRECTION IN CHINA, 203
LADY LEE’S WIDOWHOOD—PART VIII., 220
THE MARQUIS DE LAROCHEJAQUELEIN—FRANCE IN 1853, 245

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PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

NO. CCCCLIV. AUGUST, 1853. VOL. LXXIV.

THE NARCOTICS WE INDULGE IN.[1][2]

When a distinguished man sinks into his grave, from the midst of many rivals in a common race, the strife of opinions in reference to him is instantaneously allayed; personal feelings, if not quenched, are repressed and hushed; and, like the heroism of the triumphant warrior, when he is caught by the anxious eye emerging unscathed from the battle and the smoke, his merits appear now unclouded and confessed. Such, we believe, is the general feeling among the members of his own profession in regard to the author of the valuable work now before us. Snatched suddenly from the midst of his labours, before the third edition of his _Materia Medica_ was completed, there are few in any way familiar with the subject who will not regret the sudden extinction of so much learning, and, apart from all private considerations, that the world should have so prematurely lost the benefits of his ripening judgment and experience, and the results of his extended reading and research. Yet how many precious cabinets of collected knowledge do we see thus hurriedly sealed up for ever! How often, when a man appears to have reached that condition of mental culture and accumulated information, in which he is fitted to do the most for the advancement of learning, or for promoting the material comfort of his fellows, how often does the cold hand suddenly and mysteriously paralyse and stop him! He has been permitted to add only a small burden of earth to the rising mound of intellectual elevation, scarcely enough to signify to after-comers that _his_ hand has laboured at the work. Nevertheless, he may have shown a new way of advancing, in some sense, so that to others the toil is easier and the progress faster, because he has gone before. The more, however, the true-hearted worker in the cause of progressive science becomes familiar with its actual condition and its great future, the more he becomes satisfied also of the vanity of attempting to associate with an individual name the merit of this or that advance—the more earnestly he trains himself to find the best reward for individual attempts in the growing conquests and dimensions of the field he cultivates, and in the consciousness that he has not been unhelpful in widening its domain. Such a consciousness Dr Pereira might well entertain, and we trust he found in it something to alleviate the regrets the best of us naturally feel, when compelled to leave a favourite task unfinished.

We should be forsaking widely the field we usually occupy, were we to attempt to lay before our readers any analysis of a work so elaborate and so purely professional as this of Dr Pereira. We propose, however, to take it as our text-book, in considering a subject of great general interest—one scarcely of more importance to the professional physician than it is to the physiologist, the psychologist, and the economical statist. The book is replete with scattered information on the subject of the _Narcotics we Indulge in_, and some of this we propose to bring together in the present article. And among other sources from which we mean to draw the materials necessary to our purpose, are the _Confessions of an English Opium-Eater_, long, long ago noticed in our pages, but, to us who have been reading it to-day, as fresh and new as ever—as full of interest, as suggestive of profound reflection. We who are ourselves somewhat scientific, can scarce restrain a selfish sigh when we think how fresh and new, how sure of human sympathy this actual burning experience of a living man will continue to be when the heavy and toilsome tomes of Pereira shall have become mere records of the progress of science, and be turned up only to illustrate the ignorance of the most learned or trusted in their professions about the middle of the nineteenth century.

In ministering fully to his natural wants, man passes through three successive stages. First, the necessities of his material existence are provided for; next, his cares are assuaged and for the time banished; and lastly, his enjoyments, intellectual and animal, are multiplied and for the time exalted. Beef and bread represent the means by which, in every country, the first end is attained; fermented liquors help us to the second; and the third we reach by the aid of narcotics.

When we examine, in a chemical sense, the animal and vegetable productions which in a thousand varied forms, among various nations, take the place of the beef and pudding of the Englishman in supplying the first necessities of our nature, we are struck with the remarkable general similarity which prevails among them naturally, or which they are made to assume by the artifices of cookery, before they are conveyed into the stomach. And we exclaim, in irrepressible wonder, “by what universal instinct is it that, under so many varied conditions of climate and of natural vegetation, the experience of man has led him everywhere so nicely to adjust the chemical constitution of the staple forms of his diet to the chemical wants of his living body?”

Nor is the lightening of care less widely and extensively attained. Savage and civilised tribes, near and remote—the houseless barbarian wanderer, the settled peasant, and the skilled citizen—all have found, without intercommunion, through some common and instinctive process, the art of preparing fermented drinks, and of procuring for themselves the enjoyments and miseries of intoxication. The juice of the cocoa-nut tree yields its _toddy_ wherever this valuable palm can be made to grow. Another palm affords a fermented wine on the Andean slopes of Chili—the sugar palm intoxicates in the Indian Archipelago, and among the Moluccas and Philippines—while the best palm wine of all is prepared from the sap of the oilpalms of the African coast. In Mexico the American aloe (_Agave Americana_) gave its much-loved _pulque_, and probably also its ardent brandy, long before Cortez invaded the ancient monarchy of the Aztecs. Fruits supply the cider, the perry and the wine, of many civilised regions—barley and the cereal grains the beer and brandy of others; while the milk of their breeding mares supplies at will to the wandering Tartar, either a mild exhilarating drink, or an ardently intoxicating spirit. And to our wonder at the wide prevalence of this taste, and our surprise at the success with which, in so many different ways, mankind has been able to gratify it, the chemist adds a new wonder and surprise when he tells us, that as in the case of his food, so in preparing his intoxicating drinks, man has everywhere come to the same result. His fermented liquors, wherever and from whatever substances prepared, all contain the same exciting alcohol, producing everywhere, upon every human being, the same exhilarating effects!

It is somewhat different as regards the next stage of human wants—the exalted stage which we arrive at by the aid of narcotics. Of these narcotics, it is remarkable that almost every country or tribe has its own—either aboriginal or imported—so that the universal instinct has led somehow or other to the universal supply of this want also.

The aborigines of Central America rolled up the tobacco leaf, and dreamed away their lives in smoky reveries, ages before Columbus was born, or the colonists of Sir Walter Raleigh brought it within the chaste precincts of the Elizabethan court. The coca leaf, now the comfort and strength of the Peruvian muletero, was chewed as _he_ does it, in far remote times, and among the same mountains, by the Indian natives whose blood he inherits. The use of opium and hemp, and the betel nut, among eastern Asiatics, mounts up to the times of most fabulous antiquity, as probably does that of the pepper tribe in the South Sea Islands and the Indian archipelago; while in northern Europe the hop, and in Tartary the narcotic fungus, have been in use from time immemorial. In all these countries the wished-for end has been attained, as in the case of intoxicating drinks, by different means; but the precise effect upon the system, by the use of each substance, has not, in this case, been the same. On the contrary, tobacco, and coca, and opium, and hemp, and the hop, and _Cocculus indicus_, and the toadstool, each exercise an influence upon the human frame, which is peculiar to itself, and which in many respects is full of interest, and deserving of profound study. These differences we so far know to arise from the active substances they severally contain being chemically different.

I. TOBACCO.—Of all the narcotics we have mentioned, tobacco is in use over the largest area, and by the greatest number of people. Opium comes next to it; and the hemp plant occupies the third place.

The tobacco plant is indigenous to tropical America, whence it was introduced into Spain and France in the beginning of the sixteenth century by the Spaniards, and into England half a century later (1586) by Sir Francis Drake. Since that time, both the use and the cultivation of the plant have spread over a large portion of the globe. Besides the different parts of America, including Canada, New Brunswick, the United States, Mexico, the Western coast, the Spanish main, Brazil, Cuba, St Domingo, Trinidad, &c., it has spread in the East into Turkey, Persia, India, China, Australia, the Philippine Islands, and Japan. It has been raised with success also in nearly every country of Europe; while in Africa it is cultivated in Egypt, Algeria, in the Canaries, on the Western coast, and at the Cape of Good Hope. It is, indeed, among narcotics, what the potato is among food-plants—the most extensively cultivated, the most hardy, and the most tolerant of changes in temperature, altitude, and general climate.

We need scarcely remark, that the use of the plant has become not less universal than its cultivation. In America it is met with everywhere, and the consumption is enormous. In Europe, from the plains of sunny Castile to the frozen Archangel, the pipe and the cigar are a common solace among all ranks and conditions. In vain was the use of it prohibited in Russia, and the knout threatened for the first offence, and death for the second. In vain Pope Urban VIII. thundered out his bull against it. In vain our own James I. wrote his “Counterblaste to Tobacco.” Opposition only excited more general attention to the plant, awakened curiosity regarding it, and promoted its consumption.

So in the East—the priests and sultans of Turkey and Persia declared smoking a sin against their holy religion, yet nevertheless the Turks and Persians became the greatest smokers in the world. In Turkey the pipe is perpetually in the mouth; in India all classes and both sexes smoke; in China the practice is so universal that “every female, from the age of eight or nine years, wears as an appendage to her dress a small silken pocket, to hold tobacco and a pipe.” It is even argued by Pallas that the extensive prevalence of the practice in Asia, and especially in China, proves the use of tobacco for smoking to be more ancient than the discovery of the New World. “Amongst the Chinese,” he says, “and amongst the Mongol tribes who had the most intercourse with them, the custom of smoking is so general, so frequent, and has become so indispensable a luxury; the tobacco purse affixed to their belt so necessary an article of dress; the form of the pipes, from which the Dutch seem to have taken the model of theirs, so original; and, lastly, the preparation of the yellow leaves, which are merely rubbed to pieces and then put into the pipe, so peculiar—that they could not possibly derive all this from America by way of Europe, especially as India, where the practice of smoking is not so general, intervenes between Persia and China.”[3]

Leaving this question of its origin, the reader will not be surprised, when he considers how widely the practice of smoking prevails, that the total produce of tobacco grown on the face of the globe has been calculated by Mr Crawford to amount to the enormous quantity of two millions of tons. The comparative magnitude of this quantity will strike the reader more forcibly, when we state that the whole of the wheat consumed by the inhabitants of Great Britain—estimating it at a quarter a-head, or in round numbers at twenty millions of quarters—weighs only four and one-third millions of tons; so that the tobacco yearly raised for the gratification of this one form of the narcotic appetite weighs as much as the wheat consumed by ten millions of Englishmen. And reckoning it at only double the market value of wheat, or twopence and a fraction per pound, it is worth in money as much as all the wheat eaten in Great Britain.

The largest producers, and probably the largest consumers, of tobacco, are the United States of America. The annual production, at the last two decennial periods of their census returns, was estimated at

1840, 219,163,319 lb.
1850, 199,752,646 „

being about one-twentieth part of the whole supposed produce of the globe.

One of the remarkable circumstances connected with the history of tobacco is, the rapidity with which its growth and consumption have increased, in almost every country, since the discovery of America. In 1662, the quantity raised in Virginia—the chief producer of tobacco on the American shores of the Atlantic—was only 60,000 lb.; and the quantity exported from that colony in 1689, only 120,000 lb. In two hundred and thirty years, the produce has risen to nearly twice as many millions. And the extension of its use in our own country may be inferred from the facts that, in the above year of 1689, the total importation was 120,000 lb. of Virginian tobacco, part of which was probably re-exported; while, in 1852, the quantity entered for home consumption amounted to

28,558,753 lb.

being something over a pound per head of the whole population; and to this must be added the large quantity of contraband tobacco, which the heavy duty of 3s. per lb. tempts the smuggler to introduce. The whole duty levied on the above quantity in 1852, was £4,560,741, which is equal to a poll-tax of 3s. a head.

Tobacco, as every child among us now knows, is used for smoking, for chewing, and for snuffing. The second of these practices is, in many respects, the most disgusting, and is now rarely seen in this country, except among seafaring men. On shipboard, smoking is always dangerous, and often forbidden; while snuffing is expensive and inconvenient; so that, if the weed must be used, the practice of chewing it can alone be resorted to.

For the smoker and chewer it is prepared in various forms, and sold under different names. The dried leaves, coarsely broken, are sold as canaster or knaster. When moistened, compressed, and cut into fine threads, they form cut or shag tobacco. Moistened with molasses or with syrup, and pressed into cakes, they are called cavendish and negrohead, and are used indifferently either for chewing or smoking. Moistened in the same way, and beaten until they are soft, and then twisted into a thick string, they form the pigtail or twist of the chewer. Cigars are formed of the dried leaves, deprived of their midribs, and rolled up into a short spindle. When cut straight, or truncated at each end, as is the custom at Manilla, they are distinguished as _cheroots_.

For the snuff-taker, the dried leaves are sprinkled with water, laid in heaps, and allowed to ferment. They are then dried again, reduced to powder, and baked or roasted. The dry snuffs, like the Scotch and Irish, are usually prepared from the midribs—the rappees, or moist snuffs, from the soft part of the leaves. The latter are also variously scented, to suit the taste of the customer.

Extensively as it is used, it is surprising how very few can state distinctly the effects which tobacco produces—can explain the kind of pleasure the use of it gives them—why they began, and for what reason they continue the indulgence. In truth, few have thought of these points—have cared to analyse their sensations when under the narcotic influence of tobacco—or, if they have analysed them, would care to tell truly what kind of relief it is which they seek in the use of it. “In habitual smokers,” says Dr Pereira, “the practice, when employed moderately, provokes thirst, increases the secretion of saliva, and produces a remarkably soothing and tranquillising effect on the mind, which has made it so much admired and adopted by all classes of society, and by all nations, civilised and barbarous.” Taken in excess in any form, and especially by persons unaccustomed to it, it produces nausea, vomiting, in some cases purging, universal trembling, staggering, convulsive movements, paralysis, torpor, and death. Cases are on record of persons killing themselves by smoking seventeen or eighteen pipes at a sitting. With some constitutions it never agrees; but both our author and Dr Christison of Edinburgh agree that “no well-ascertained ill effects have been shown to result from the habitual practice of smoking.” The effects of chewing are of a similar kind. Those of snuffing are only less in degree; and the influence which tobacco exercises in the mouth, in promoting the flow of saliva, &c., manifests itself when used as snuff in producing sneezing, and in increasing the discharge of mucus from the nose. The excessive use of snuff, however, blunts the sense of smell, alters the tone of voice, and occasionally produces dyspepsia and loss of appetite. In rarer cases it ultimately induces apoplexy and delirium.

But it is the soothing and tranquillising effect it has on the mind for which tobacco is chiefly indulged in. And amid the teasing paltry cares, as well as the more poignant griefs of life, what a blessing that a mere material soother and tranquilliser can be found, accessible alike to all—to the desolate and the outcast, equally with him who is rich in a happy home and the felicity of sympathising friends! Is there any one so sunk in happiness himself, as to wonder that millions of the world-chafed should flee to it for solace? Yet the question still remains which is to bring out the peculiar characteristic of tobacco. We may take for granted that it acts in some way upon the nervous system; but what is the special effect of tobacco on the brain and nerves, to which the pleasing reverie it produces is to be ascribed? “The pleasure of the reverie consequent on the indulgence of the pipe consists,” according to Dr Madden, “in a temporary annihilation of thought. People really cease to think when they have been long smoking. I have asked Turks repeatedly what they have been thinking of during their long smoking reveries, and they replied, ‘Of nothing.’ I could not remind them of a single idea having occupied their minds; and in the consideration of the Turkish character there is no more curious circumstance connected with their moral condition. The opinion of Locke, that the soul of a waking man is never without thought, because it is the condition of being awake, is, in my mind, contradicted by the waking somnambulism, if I may so express myself, of a Moslem.”[4]

We concede that Dr Madden might find in England, in Germany, and in Holland, many good smokers, who would make excellent Moslems in his sense, and who at the close of long tobacco reveries are utterly unconscious and innocent of a single thought. Yet we restrict our faith in his opinion to the simple belief, that tobacco, with a haze such as its smoke creates, tends to soften down and assuage the intensity of all inner thoughts or external impressions which affect the feelings, and thus to create a still and peaceful repose—such a quiet rest as one fancies might be found in the hazy distance of Turner’s landscapes. We deny that, in Europeans in general, smoking puts an end to intellectual exertion. In moderation, our own experience is, that it sharpens and strengthens it; and we doubt very much if those learned Teutonic Professors, who smoke all day, whose studies are perpetually obscured by the fumes of the weed, and who are even said to smoke during sleep, would willingly, or with good temper, concede that the heavy tomes which in yearly thousands appear at the Leipsic book fair, have all been written after their authors had “really ceased to think.” Still it is probably true, and may be received as the characteristic of tobacco among narcotics, that its major and first effect is to assuage, and allay, and soothe the system in general; its minor, and second, or after effect, to excite and invigorate, and, at the same time, give steadiness and fixity to the powers of thought.

The active substances, or chemical ingredients of tobacco or tobacco smoke, by which these effects upon the system are produced, are three in number. The _first_ is a volatile oil, of which about two grains can be obtained from a pound of leaves, by distilling them with water. This oil or fat “is solid, has the odour of tobacco, and a bitter taste. It excites in the tongue and throat a sensation similar to that of tobacco smoke; and, when swallowed, gives rise to giddiness, nausea, and an inclination to vomit.” Small as the quantity is, therefore, which is present in the leaf, this substance must be regarded as one of the ingredients upon which the effects of tobacco depend.

The _second_ is a volatile _alkali_, as it is called by chemists, which is also obtained by a form of distillation. The substance is liquid, has the odour of tobacco, an acrid burning taste, and is possessed of narcotic and highly poisonous qualities. In this latter quality it is scarcely inferior to Prussic acid. The proportion of this substance contained in the leaf varies from 3 to 8 per cent, so that he who smokes a hundred grains of tobacco _may_ draw into his mouth from three to eight grains of one of the most subtle of all known poisons. It will not be doubted, therefore, that some of the effects of tobacco are to be ascribed to this peculiar substance.

The third is an oil—an empyreumatic oil, it is called—which does not exist ready formed in the natural leaf, but is produced along with other substances during the burning. This is supposed to be “the juice of cursed hebenon,” described by Shakspeare as a _distilment_.[5] It is acrid, disagreeable to the taste, narcotic, and so poisonous that a single drop on the tongue of a cat causes immediate convulsions, and in two minutes death.

Of these three active ingredients contained in tobacco smoke, the Turkish and Indian pipes, in which the smoke is made to pass slowly through water, arrest a large proportion, and therefore convey the air to the mouth in a milder form. The reservoir of the German meerschaums retains the grosser portions of the oils, &c., produced by burning; and the long stem of the Russian pipe has a similar effect. The Dutch and English pipes retain less; while the cigar, especially when smoked to the end, discharges everything into the mouth of the smoker, and, when he retains the saliva, gives him the benefit of the united action of all the three narcotic substances together. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who have been accustomed to smoke cigars, especially such as are made of strong tobacco, should find any other pipe both tame and tasteless, except the short black _cutty_, which has lately come into favour again among inveterate smokers.

The chewer of tobacco, it will be understood from the above description of its active ingredients, is not exposed to the effects of the oil which is produced during the burning. The natural oil and the volatile alkali are the substances which act upon him. The taker of snuff is in the same condition. But _his_ drug is still milder than that of the chewer, inasmuch as the artificial drying or roasting to which the tobacco is subjected in the preparation of snuff, drives off a portion of the natural volatile oil, and a large part of the volatile alkali, and thus renders it considerably less active than the natural leaf.

In all the properties by which tobacco is characterised, the produce of different countries and districts is found to exhibit very sensible differences. At least eight or ten species, and numerous varieties, of the plant are cultivated; and the leaf of each of these, even where they are all grown in the same locality, is found to exhibit sensible peculiarities. To these climate and soil add each its special effects; while the period of growth at which the leaves are gathered, and the way in which they are dried or cured, exercise a well-known influence on the quality of the crop. To these causes of diversity is owing, for the most part, the unlike estimation in which Virginian, Cuban, Brazilian, Peruvian, East Indian, Persian, and Turkish tobaccos are held in the market.

The chemist explains all the known and well-marked diversities of quality and flavour in the unadulterated leaf, by showing that each recognised variety of tobacco contains the active ingredients of the leaf in a peculiar form or proportion; and it is interesting to find science in his hands first rendering satisfactory reasons for the decisions of taste. Thus, he has shown that the natural volatile oil does not exist in the green leaf, but is formed during the drying, and hence the reason why the mode of curing affects the strength and quality of the dried leaf. He has also shown that the proportion of the poisonous alkali (nicotin) is smallest (2 per cent) in the best Havannah, and largest (7 per cent) in the Virginian tobacco, and hence a natural and sound reason for the preference given to the former by the smokers of cigars.

As to the lesser niceties of flavour, this probably depends upon other odoriferous ingredients not so active in their nature, or so essential to the leaf as those already mentioned. The leaves of plants, in this respect, are easily affected by a variety of circumstances, and especially by the nature of the soil they grow in, and of the manure applied to them. Even to the grosser senses of us Europeans, it is known, for example, that pigs’ dung carries its _gout_ into the tobacco raised by its means. But the more refined organs of the Druses and Maronites of Mount Lebanon readily recognise, by the flavour of their tobacco, the kind of manure employed in its cultivation, and esteem, above all others, that which has been aided in its growth by the droppings of the goat.

But in countries where high duties upon tobacco hold out a temptation to fraud, artificial flavours are given by various forms of adulteration. “Saccharine matter (molasses, sugar, honey, &c.), which is the principal adulterating ingredient, is said to be used both for the purpose of adding to the weight of the tobacco, and of rendering it more agreeable. Vegetable leaves (as those of rhubarb and the beech), mosses, bran, the sproutings of malt, beet-root dregs, liquorice, terra japonica, rosin, yellow ochre, fullers’ earth, sand, saltpetre, common salt, sal-ammoniac”[6]—such is a list of the substances which have been detected in adulterated tobacco. How many more may be in daily use for the purpose, who can tell? Is it surprising, therefore, that we should meet with manufactured tobacco possessing a thousand different flavours for which the chemistry of the natural leaf can in no way account?

There are two other circumstances in connection with the history of tobacco, which, because of their economical and social bearings, are possessed of much interest.

_First_, Every smoker must have observed the quantity of ash he has occasion to empty out of his pipe, or the large nozzle he knocks off from time to time from the burning end of his cigar. This incombustible part is equal to one-fourth or one-fifth of the whole weight of the dried leaf, and consists of earthy or mineral matter which the tobacco plant has drawn from the soil on which it has grown. Every ton, when dried, of the tobacco leaf which is gathered, carries off, therefore, from four to five hundredweight of this mineral matter from the soil. And as the substances of which the mineral matter consists are among those which are at once most necessary to vegetation, and least abundant even in fertile soils, it will readily be understood that the frequent growth and removal of tobacco from the same field must gradually affect its fertility, and sooner or later exhaust it.

It has been, and still is, to a great extent, the misfortune of many tobacco-growing regions, that this simple deduction was unknown and unheeded. The culture has been continued year after year upon virgin soils, till the best and richest were at last wearied and worn out, and patches of deserted wilderness are at length seen where tobacco plantations formerly extended and flourished. Upon the Atlantic borders of the United States of America, the best known modern instances of such exhausting culture are to be found. It is one of the triumphs of the chemistry of this century, that it has ascertained what the land loses by such imprudent treatment—what is the cause, therefore, of the barrenness that befalls it, and by what new management its ancient fertility may be again restored.

_Second_, It is melancholy to think that the gratification of this narcotic instinct of man should in some countries—and especially in North America, Cuba, and Brazil—have become a source of human misery in its most aggravated forms. It was long ago remarked of the tobacco culture by President Jefferson, in his _Notes on Virginia_, that “it is a culture productive of infinite wretchedness. Those employed in it are in a continued state of exertion beyond the powers of nature to support. Little food of any kind is raised by them, so that the men and animals on these farms are badly fed, and the earth is rapidly impoverished.”[7] But these words do not convey to the English reader a complete idea of the misery they allude to. The men employed in the culture, who suffer the “infinite wretchedness,” are the slaves on the plantations. And it is melancholy, as we have said, to think that the gratification of the passion for tobacco should not only have been an early stimulus to the extension of slavery in the United States, but should continue still to be one of the props by which it is sustained. The exports of tobacco from the United States in the year ending June 1850, were valued at ten millions of dollars. This sum European smokers pay for the maintenance of slavery in these states, besides what they contribute for the same purpose to Cuba and Brazil. The practice of smoking is in itself, we believe, neither a moral nor a social evil; it is merely the gratification of a natural and universal, as it is an innocent instinct. Pity that such evils should be permitted to flow from what is in itself so harmless!

II. The HOP, which may now be called the _English narcotic_, was brought from the Low Countries, and is not known to have been used in malt liquor in this country till after the year 1524, in the reign of Henry VIII. In 1850 the quantity of hops grown in England was 21,668 tons, paying a duty of £270,000. This is supposed to be a larger quantity than is grown in all the world besides. Only 98 tons were exported in that year; while, on the other hand, 320 tons were imported, so that the home consumption amounted to 21,886 tons, or 49 millions of pounds; being two-thirds more than the weight of the tobacco which we yearly consume. It is the narcotic substance, therefore, of which England not only grows more and consumes more than all the world besides, but of which Englishmen consume more than they do of any other substance of the same class.

And who that has visited the hop grounds of Kent and Surrey in the flowering season, will ever forget the beauty and grace of this charming plant? Climbing the tall poles, and circling them with its clasping tendrils, it hides the formality and stiffness of the tree that supports it among the exuberant profusion of its clustering flowers. Waving and drooping in easy motion with every tiny breath that stirs them, and hanging in curved wreaths from pole to pole, the hopbines dance and glitter beneath the bright English sun—the picture of a true English vineyard, which neither the Rhine nor the Rhone can equal, and only Italy, where her vines climb the freest, can surpass.

The hop “joyeth in a fat and fruitful ground,” as old Gerard hath it (1596). “It prospereth the better by manuring.” And few spots surpass, either in natural fertility or in artificial richness, the hop lands of Surrey, which lie along the out-crop of the green sand measures in the neighbourhood of Farnham. Naturally rich to an extraordinary degree in the mineral food of plants, the soils in this locality have been famed for centuries for the growth of hops; and with a view to this culture alone, at the present day, the best portions sell as high as £500 an acre. And the _highest_ Scotch farmer—the most liberal of manure—will find himself outdone by the hop-growers of Kent and Surrey. An average of ten pounds an acre for manure over a hundred acres of hops, makes this branch of farming the most liberal, the most remarkable, and the most expensive of any in England.

This mode of managing the hop, and the peculiar value and rarity of hop land, were known very early. They form parts of its history which were probably imported with the plant itself. Tusser, who lived in Henry VIII.’s time, and in the reigns of his three children, in his _Points of Husbandry_ thus speaks of the hop:—

“Choose soil for the hop of the rottenest mould,
Well-doonged and wrought as a garden-plot should:
Not far from the water (but not overfloune),
This lesson well noted, is meet to be knowne.

The sun in the south, or else southlie and west,
Is joy to the hop as welcommed ghest;
But wind in the north, or else northerly east,
To hop is as ill as fray in a feast.

Meet plot for a hop-yard, once found as is told,
Make thereof account, as of jewel of gold;
Now dig it and leave it, the sun for to burne,
And afterwards fense it, to serve for that turne.
The hop for his profit, I thus do exalt:
It strengthened drink, and favoureth malt;
And being well brewed, long kep it will last,
And drawing abide, if ye draw not too fast.”[8]

The hops of commerce consist of the female flowers and seeds of the _humulus lupulus_, or common hop plant. Their principal consumption is in the manufacture of beer, to which they give a pleasant, bitter, aromatic flavour, and tonic properties. Part of the soporific quality of beer also is ascribed to the hops, and they are supposed by their chemical properties to check the tendency to become sour. The active principles in the hop consist of a volatile oil, and a peculiar bitter principle to which the name of _lupulin_ is given.

When the hop flowers are distilled with water, they yield as much as eight per cent of their weight of a volatile oil, which has a brownish yellow colour, a strong smell of hops, and a slightly bitter taste. In this “oil of hops” it has hitherto been supposed that a portion of the narcotic influence of the flowers resided, but recent experiments render this opinion doubtful. It is probable that in the case both of tobacco and of the hop, a volatile substance distils over in small quantity along with the oil, which has not hitherto been examined separately, and in which the narcotic virtue resides. This is rendered probable by the fact that the rectified hop oil is not possessed of narcotic properties.

The hop has long been celebrated for its sleep-giving qualities. To the weary and wakeful, the hop-pillow has often given refreshing rest, when every other sleep-producer had failed. It is to the escape, in minute quantity, of the volatile narcotic substance we have spoken of, that this soporific effect of the flowers is most probably to be ascribed.

Besides the oil and other volatile matter which distil from them, the hop flowers, and especially the fine powdery grains or dust which, by rubbing, can be separated from them, yield to alcohol a bitter principle (lupulin) and a resinous substance, both in considerable proportion. In a common tincture of hops these substances are contained. They are aromatic and tonic, and impart their own qualities to our beer. They are also soothing, tranquillising, and in a slight degree sedative and soporific, in which properties well-hopped beer also resembles them. It is certain that hops possess a narcotic virtue which beer derives from them;[9] but in what part of the female flower, or in what peculiar chemical compound this narcotic property chiefly resides, is still a matter of doubt.

To the general reader it may appear remarkable, that the chemistry of a vegetable production, in such extensive use as the hop, should still be so imperfect—our knowledge of its nature and composition so unsatisfactory. But the well-read chemist, who knows how wide the field of chemical research is, and how rapidly our knowledge of it, as a whole, is progressing, will feel no surprise. He may wish to see all such obscurities and difficulties cleared away, but he will feel inclined rather to thank and praise the many ardent and devoted men, now labouring in this department, for what they are doing, than to blame them for being obliged to leave a part of the extensive field for the present uncultivated.

Among largely used narcotics, therefore, especially in England, the hop is to be placed. It differs, however, from all the others we have mentioned, in being rarely employed alone except medicinally. It is added to infusions like that of malt, to impart flavour, taste, and narcotic virtues. Used in this way, it is unquestionably one of the sources of that pleasing excitement, gentle intoxication, and healthy tonic action, which well-hopped beer is known to produce upon those who drink it. Other common vegetable productions will give the bitter flavour to malt liquor. Horehound and wormwood, and gentian and quassia and strychnia, and the grains of paradise, and chicory, and various other plants, have been used to replace or supplant the hop. But none are known to approach it in imparting those peculiar qualities which have given the bitter beer of the present day so well-merited a reputation.

Among our working classes, it is true, in the porters and humbler beers they consume and prefer, the _Cocculus indicus_ finds a degree of favour which has caused it, to a considerable degree, to take the place of the hop. This singular berry possesses an intoxicating property, and not only replaces the hop by its bitterness, but to a certain extent also supplies the deficiency of malt. To weak extracts of malt it gives a richness and _fulness in the mouth_, which usually imply the presence of much malt, with a bitterness which enables the brewer to withhold one-third of his hops, and a colour which aids him in the darkening of his porter. The middle classes in England prefer the thin wine-like bitter beer. The skilled labourers in the manufacturing districts prefer what is rich, full, and substantial in the mouth. With a view to their taste, it is too often drugged with the _Cocculus indicus_ by disreputable brewers; and much of the very beastly intoxication which the consumption of malt liquor in England produces, is probably due to this pernicious admixture. So powerful is the effect of this berry on the apparent richness of beer, that a single pound produces an equal effect with a bag of malt. The temptation to use it, therefore, is very strong. The quantity imported in 1850 was 2359 cwt., equal to a hundred and twelve times as many bags of malt; and although we cannot strictly class it among the narcotics we voluntarily indulge in, it may certainly be described as one in which thousands of the humbler classes are compelled to indulge.

It is interesting to observe how men carry with them their early tastes to whatever new climate or region they go. The love of beer and hops has been planted by Englishmen in America. It has accompanied them to their new empires in Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape. In the hot East their home taste remains unquenched, and the pale ale of England follows them to remotest India. Who can tell to what extent the use of the hop may become naturalised, through their means, in these far-off regions? Who can predict that, inoculated into its milder influence, the devotees of opium and the intoxicating hemp may not hereafter be induced to abandon their hereditary drugs, and to substitute the foreign hop in their place? From such a change in one article of consumption, how great a change in the character of the people might we not anticipate?

This leads us to remark, that we cannot as yet very well explain in what way and to what extent the use of prevailing narcotics is connected, as cause or effect, with peculiarities in national character. But there can no longer be any doubt that the soothers and exciters we indulge in, in some measure as the luxuries of life, though sought for at first merely to gratify a natural craving, do afterwards gradually but sensibly modify the individual character. And where the use is general and extended, the influence of course affects in time the whole people. It is a problem of interest to the legislator, not less than to the physiologist and psychologist, to ascertain how far and in what direction such a reaction can go—how much of the actual tastes, habits, and character of existing nations has been created by the prolonged consumption of the fashionable and prevailing forms of narcotics in use among them respectively, and how far tastes and habits have been modified by the changes in these forms which have been introduced and adopted within historic times. The reader will readily perceive that this inquiry has in it a valid importance quite distinct from that which attaches itself to the supposed influence of the different varieties of intoxicating fermented drinks in use in different countries. The latter, as we have said, all contain the same intoxicating principle, and so far, therefore, exercise a common influence upon all who consume them. But the narcotics now in use owe their effects to substances which in each, so far as is known, are chemically different from those which are contained in every one of the others. They must exercise, therefore, each a different physiological effect upon the system, and, if their influence, as we suppose, extend so far, must each in a special way modify also the constitution, the habits, and the character.

Our space does not permit us, in the present Number, to speak of the use of opium and hemp; we shall return to these extensively consumed drugs on a future occasion.

SOUTH AMERICAN TRAVEL AND ADVENTURE.[10]

We here associate two books which have little in common beyond their relation to the same region and races of men; the one is chiefly scientific and statistical, the other deals largely in the characteristic and romantic. Dr Weddell, physician and naturalist, and member of various scientific societies and commissions, who had previously travelled in and written of certain districts in South America, was induced, two years ago, once more to cross the Line, bound for Bolivia. His former journey had had a purely botanical object: he had gone to make acquaintance with the trees which produce the Peruvian bark. His researches were crowned with success; but he was attacked with fever and dysentery, and quitted the unwholesome shores, vowing never to revisit them. A handful of sand which he carried away with him caused him to break through his resolution. Deposited in the Museum of Natural History at Paris, it attracted attention by the beauty of the golden spangles it contained. Dr Weddell again sailed for America, this time with a double mission. The administrators of the Garden of Plants confided to him certain scientific researches; and a number of persons, whose objects were more material, commissioned him to examine and obtain concessions of tracts of land upon the Tipuani—a stream which, rising amongst the snows of the Cordilleras, flows over golden sands to its junction with one of the chief tributaries of the mighty Amazon.

Mr Theodore Pavie has been a great traveller. In the volume before us we find him alternately in India, Africa, America, on the banks of the Nile, on the Coromandel coast, in the forests that fringe the Sabine. His book includes even a Chinese legend; but that he confesses to have derived from a missionary, the companion of one of his voyages. His most interesting chapters are a series of South American sketches—in the Pampas, Chili, and Peru. He makes half an apology for having mingled fiction with facts he himself witnessed. The system he has pursued is perfectly allowable, and has been adopted by many travellers of wider fame. We may instance Sealsfield, Ruxton, and a host of other precedents. Like them, he has brought home from his distant wanderings a portfolio of rough sketches, which he has filled up, coloured, and completed by his own fireside. The landscape, the character, the figures, even some of the incidents, are true to nature; but he has thrown in a little artificial action, rendering the picture more attractive.

From the Peruvian port of Arica, which he reached, _viâ_ Southampton and Panama, in the spring of 1851, Dr Weddell started at once for the Bolivian town of La Paz. After passing Tacna, where they were detained for some days by purchase of mules and travelling stores, the doctor and his two companions, Mr Borniche and Mr Herrypon (the latter a civil engineer), soon found themselves in the mountains, and suffering from the painful sensations produced by the great rarefaction of the air. This effect of the sensible diminution of the atmospheric pressure upon the circulation and respiration is there called the _soroche_, and is ignorantly attributed by the natives to metallic emanations from the soil. At the height of about 12,000 feet above the level of the sea, the travellers came to the first _apacheta_. In former days the Peruvian Indians, upon attaining, with a burden, the summit of a mountain, were accustomed to offer to their god Pachacamac the first object that met their view. The custom was not costly, for the object was usually a stone. They accompanied the offering by several repetitions of the word _apachecta_, which was a sort of prayer. In time, this word, slightly altered, was applied to the heaps of stones which the superstition accumulated, and then to the mountain-peaks which these heaps surmounted. Apachetas are found upon all elevated points of Peruvian roads. Around one of them, at the summit of the Pass of Gualillos—estimated by Dr Weddell, and by the English traveller Pentland, to be nearly 15,000 feet above the sea—were numerous skeletons of asses, mules, and lamas, which had perished of fatigue on attaining that prodigious elevation. The three Frenchmen felt almost as much inclined to lay their own bones beside those of the defunct brutes as to push on further; but they managed to continue their route over one of those vast mountain platforms known as _puñas_, of which the German doctor Tschudi has given so striking an account. They passed the night in the village of Tacora, and had regained their wonted courage and activity when aroused next morning by their muleteer with intelligence that four vicuñas were grazing close at hand. Stealing up to them under cover of a wall, Dr Weddell and Mr Herrypon got within fair shot, fired, and missed. Three of the animals took to flight; the fourth stood its ground, and gazed boldly at its enemies. The doctor, supposing that a wound was the cause of its immobility, quitted his cover and approached the vicuña. When he got within a certain distance, the animal ran. It was too late. The doctor fired his second barrel, and the ball broke its spine. It was not, as Dr Weddell had supposed, a wound that had delayed its flight. “When a herd of vicuñas is pursued,” he says, “the most vigorous of the males, who act as chiefs, invariably remain the last upon the place of danger, as if to cover the retreat of the others. This is a fact of which we were more than once witnesses during our journey, and hence it is much easier to obtain male than female vicuñas. I have been twenty times within shot of males, but not once of females. The vicuña (_Camelus vicogna_ Gmel.) is the most numerous species (it and the _guanaco_) of the camel tribe in the New World. It is met with in all the elevated regions of the Andes, from the equator to Magellan’s Straits. The places it best loves to haunt are those where man and the condor alone can follow it. The condor, that mighty bird of prey, which is to the Andes what the eagle is to the Alps, prefers carrion to a living prey, and seldom makes war upon it; and man, until our own days, has rather encouraged its multiplication than aided in its destruction. This explains the abundance of the vicuña at the period of the conquest of Peru.” The old Spanish chroniclers relate that the vicuñas, although wild, were regarded as the exclusive property of the Incas, and any who hunted them incurred severe penalties. At fixed seasons—about once a-year—a general hunt took place, under the personal superintendence of the Inca and his chief officers; but only once in every four years was this monster _battue_ allowed in the same district. The chase was on a prodigious scale. Fifty or sixty thousand hunters—even more, if some writers are to be believed—armed themselves with poles and lances, traced an immense circle, and drove to a common centre all the animals it enclosed. A selection then took place. Roebuck, guanacos, and other inferior animals, were killed, especially the males; their skins were used for various purposes, and their flesh was divided amongst the hunters. This meat, cut in thin slices and dried, was called charqui, and composed the sole animal food of the lower classes of Peruvians. The vicuñas, of which thirty or forty thousand were often thus collected, were more gently treated. They were carefully shorn, and then set at liberty. The wool was stored in the royal warehouses, and issued as required—the inferior qualities to the people, the better ones to the nobles, who alone had a right to wear fine cloth. The tissues then manufactured from the best vicuña wool are said to have been as brilliant as the finest silks, and to have excited, by the delicacy of their tints, the envy of European manufacturers. At the present day, no salutary law protects the graceful and useful vicuñas; they lose their life with their fleece, and have greatly diminished in numbers. The Indians drive them into enclosures, knock them on the head with cudgels, or break their necks across their knees, strip off the skin, and sell it for half a dollar. The wool sells as high as a dollar a pound upon the coast of Peru. It is chiefly consumed in the country, to make hats and gloves. Only two or three thousand dollars’ worth is annually exported from Peru.