Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1886 — Tobacco. [ARTICLE]

Tobacco.

It is asserted that tobacco was in use in China from tin? earliest times, but we have, no certain knowledge that this was the case. If it was so, the knowledge of the plant and its use must have been carefully guarded by the Chinese, for it was not introduced, into any other Oriental nation until after its discovery in America. When Colnmbns first landed on the island of San Domingo, in the West Indies, he found tobacco in use among the natives there, who smoked it when made into small cylindrical rolls, and wrapped in "maize-leaf. The Indians on the continent smoked it in a pipe, among all the tribes, from Pern to Upper Canada, the first discoverers found the plant to be in use, and to have been known to them from so early a period that the time of its first discovery was unkown. The smoking of tobacco, with the Indians partook largely of the nature of a religious rite. The seeds of the tobacco plant were first brought to Europe by Gonzalo Hernandez de Oviedo, who introduced it into Spain, where it was first cultivated as an ornamental plant, till a traveler who had noted its use among the American Indians, called attention to its narcotic properties. The name is said to have been taken from Tabacco, a province of Yucatan, though others derive it from Tobago, an island iu the Caribbean Sea, and

yet others from Tobasco, in the Gulf of Florida. The practice of smoking the dried leaf of the plant became .general in Spain, and its manufacture into snuff followed soon after. It was introduced into Italy in 1560, and about the same time in France. - The first to bring the seeds of the plant into the latter eounjj try was Jean Nicot, the 'French Embassador to Portugal, in whose honor bacco received its botanical name, Nieotiana, whence the name nicotine, applied to a poisonous extract from the plant. Tobacco is said to have been first introduced into England by Sir Walter-Baleigh. From these beginnings the use of the weed spread over the entire Eastern continent. It did not become known in Asia until the seventeenth century, but was taken up by the oriental nationb with great eagerness, and they are now the greatest smokers in the world. —lnter Ocean.