Any true Sherlock Holmes of science, possest of an adequate knowledge of first principles, may unravel a very tangled web of mystery. The great naturalist requires but a few pieces of bone from any prehistoric monster in order to ascertain whether it was herbivorous or carnivorous, reptile or mammal, or even to construct a counterpart of its entire skeleton.

Everything is controlled by immutable mathematical laws, from which there is, and can be, no deviation whatsoever. We learn the complex from the simple. We arrive at the abstract by way of the concrete.

I wrote a booklet on the evil effects of the cigarette, and more than a million copies of it were distributed on the battle-front in France. About the same time, the New York World, was raising money to send hundreds of tons of cigarettes to our soldiers.

If all boys could be made to know that with every breath of cigarette smoke they inhale imbecility and exhale manhood … and that the cigarette is a maker of invalids, criminals and fools—not men—it ought to deter them some. The yellow finger stain is an emblem of deeper degradation and enslavement than the ball and chain.

Naturally, there is always a great diversity of opinion about a popular subject when it is not well understood. We all know how true this is of social, ethical and religious subjects, upon which no two persons ever really agree. The exact sciences, however, admit of no differences of opinion.

The greater the mind, the greater are the truths self-evident to it, and the greater also is its power to induce complex from simple truths—complex truths of which we may be as certain as we are of the primary self-evident truths themselves.

The wreath of cigarette smoke which curls about the head of the growing lad holds his brain in an iron grip which prevents it from growing and his mind from developing just as surely as the iron shoe does the foot of the Chinese girl.

Whatever the subject of any investigation may be, whether poetry, biology, ethics or torpedo warfare, the same scientific method of procedure must be followed. We must first unravel the complex and heterogeneous back to first principles, and then reason forward from the simple to the complex, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, from what we know to what we would learn. Such are the methods pursued by all successful inventors, scientific investigators and discoverers.