Tobacconia

THIS SMOKING WORLD--A. E. Hamilton--Century ($2.50).

TOBACCO: a digest of clinical data--Pierre Schrumpf-Pierron M. D.--Hoeber ($1.85).

For some time now the threat of tobacco prohibition in the U. S. has subsided to an occasional murmur. It began vigorously in 1878, with the founding of the Anti-Tobacco Society in New York; it sank this year as Kansas, last state with an antitobacco law, repealed its pertinent legislation. The sequence recalls 17th Century Persian history; Shah Abbas made his tobacco-using courtiers smoke camel's dung for punishment; his grandson Shah Sen poured hot, melted lead down the throats of tobacco merchants; another Shah, Abbas II, found smoking pleasant and canceled old Persian laws.

A. E. Hamilton, smoking his pipe in the Maine woods, writes with a clear equanimity the history of tobacco use and summarizes lightly the arguments for and against it.

Professor Schrumpf-Pierron (he is at the University of Cairo) catalogs for the "Committee to Study the Tobacco Problem" (Dr. Alexander Lambert of Manhattan is its president) the effect of tobacco on the various parts and functions of the human body. It is a thoroughly scientific report by a trained, far-read clinician.

Both books report the bad effect of immoderate smoking. Both belittle attempts to suppress moderate smoking. Both are source books, in their even arrangements of facts, for antagonists and protagonists of tobacco.