THE HISTORY OF TOBACCO.

Northern Advocate, 4 September 1913, Page 6

THE HISTORY OF TOBACCO.

Mr Charles Singer tells us many interesting things about the early his-

Tory of tobacco in the "Quarterly Review." Columbus appears to have seen the plant a few hours after he set foot on American soil. This information has reached us through the manuscripts of Las Casas, the Apostle of the Indies (1474-15 C:;). Tobacco-chewing was encountered on t.-.e nciinland of South America by the Spaniards in 1502, and it has since become evident, both from the traditions of the Indians themselves,

and from the discovery of pipes in ancient graves, that the use of the

soothing weed in America is of very gad antiquity. Hernando Cents, (lie (.".•irp-.eror of Mexico, is sun' to have presented tobacco-grains to Charles V. in 1518; and Jaques Cartier, the Breton navigator, tells how t.tie -la+ives had a herb whic , '. tl.ey dried in the sun and carried about their necks in a little beast's skin, with a horn of stolie or wood. "Then presently they make powder of this herb, and place it. in one of the ends of the said horn, and, putting a tiny coal of fire thereon, they suck at the other end, and thus they fill their bodies with smoke, so that it comes out by the mouth and r<*trils as by a chimney tn-nel." The earliest published picture of the actual process of smoking, reproduced in the "Quarterly," is to be found in the description of the southern part of America by the French geographer, Andre Thevet, which was published in Paris in 1558. It was not until July 28, 1556, that Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh brought, the first tobacco to England _____