important part in this respect.  Dr. O’Shaughnessy is certainly the most accomplished chemist who had ever, in India, turned his attention to the subject, and he has published the results of his analyses of specimens of opium from the different divisions of the Behar Agency, which are worthy of much attention.  In the opium from eight divisions of the agency, he found the quantity of morphia to range from 13/4 grains to 31/2 grains per cent., and the amount of the narcotine to vary from 3/4 grain to 31/2 grains per cent., the consistence of the various specimens being between 75 and 79 per cent.  In the opium from the Hazareebaugh district (the consistence of the drug being 77), he found 41/2 per cent, of morphia, and 4 per cent, narcotine; whilst from a specimen of Patna-garden opium he extracted no less than 103/4 per cent. of morphia, and 6 per cent. of narcotine, the consistence of the drug being 87.  With respect to the last specimen, Dr. O’Shaughnessy mentions that the poppies which produced it were irrigated three times during the season, and that no manure was employed upon the soil.  It is much to be regretted that these interesting results were not coupled with an analysis of the soils from which the specimens were produced, for to chemical variations in it must be attributed the widely different results recorded above.

Opium as a medicine has been used from the earliest ages; but when it was first resorted to as a luxury, it is impossible to state, though it is not at all improbable that this was coeval with its employment in medicine, for how often do we find that, from having been first administered as a sedative for pain, it has been continued until it has taken the place of the evil.  Such must have happened from the earliest ages, as it happens daily in the present; but as a national vice it was not known until the spread of Islamism, when, by the tenets of the Prophet, wine and fermented liquors being prohibited, it came in their stead along with the bang or hasch-schash (made from hemp), coffee, and tobacco.  From the Arabs the inhabitants of the Eastern Archipelago most probably imbibed their predilection for opium, although their particular manner of using it has evidently been derived from the Chinese.  China, where at present it is so extensively used, cannot be said to have indulged long in the vice.  Previous to 1767 the number of chests imported did not exceed 200 yearly; now the average is 50,000 to 60,000.  In 1773 the East India Company made their first venture in opium, and in 1796 it was declared a crime to smoke opium.

In different countries we find opium consumed in different ways.  In England it is either used in a solid state, made into pills, or a tincture in the shape of laudanum.  Insidiously it is given to children under a variety of quack forms, such as “Godfrey’s cordial,” &c.  In India the pure opium is either dissolved in water and so used, or rolled into pills.  It is there a common practice to give it