y. With all this
irregularity, he is a total stranger to lingering complaints, and to
that numerous as well as fashionable class of diseases denominated
"Nervous." That formidable ailment, _Dyspepsia_, which, like a fiend,
has, for the last few years pervaded the whole land, is unknown to the
Indian; having its origin in the abuses introduced by civilization and
refinement. But to return:

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that a man who daily uses tobacco,
enjoys equal health with one who uses none, and is no more liable to
disease; let him once be attacked by disease, and then it will be far
more difficult to remove it, than to do so in one free from such habit.

This will appear from the following considerations:

Remedial agents ordinarily act on the system, by exciting the living
power through the medium of the nerves; hence when these have long been
deadened by the habitual use of any narcotic, common sense, aside from
the lights of science and philosophy, would teach us the difficulty of
making an impression on a system whose nerves had thus been previously
paralyzed.

Perhaps the man, who daily drinks ardent spirit, may, from the greater
insensibility of his system, in some cases escape sickness as long as
the most temperate, (though this is by no means a common fact); yet, let
disease once commence, and then we learn, by painful experience, the
disadvantage of having broken down the nervous system by needless and
vicious excess.

Tobacco is acknowledged to be one of the most deadly of the vegetable
narcotics: yet experience proves that the nerves, by habit, become so
accustomed to its stimulus, that it in a great measure loses its power.
How then can we hope with ordinary remedies to make an impression, when
even this powerful agent has itself lost its proper and natural effect?

The unparalleled mortality of the great epidemic of 1812 and 1813, was
in a good measure owing to the immense quantities of ardent spirit
consumed by the victims of that fatal malady. In the town in which I
then resided, about 