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Man was not born with a cigar in his mouth, and it is not certain that the Nicotiana tabacum flourished in the Garden of Eden. But history proves the existence of an instinct among all races call it depraved, if you will, the fact remains leading them to employ narcotics. And narcotics all nations have sought and found. We venture to affirm that tobacco is harmless as any.
In honor of its sponsor, Botany has named the plant Nicotiana tabacum, and Chemistry distinguished as Nicotin its active alkaloid. Sir Francis Drake first brought tobacco to England about 1586. It owed the greater part of its early popularity, however, to the praise and practice of Raleigh: his high standing and character would have sufficed to introduce still more novel customs.
But one of these five varieties, when used either as father or mother, and crossed with the Nicotiana glutinosa, always yielded hybrids not so sterile as those which were produced from the four other varieties when crossed with N. glutinosa. Hence the reproductive system of this one variety must have been in some manner and in some degree modified.
Though pipes are found carved on very old sculptures in China, and the habit of smoking was long since extensively followed there, according to Pallas, and although certain species of the tobacco-plant, as the Nicotiana rustica, would appear to be indigenous to the country, yet we have the best reason to conclude that America, if not the exclusive home of the herb, was the birthplace of its use by man.
In consequence of his encounter with Marimonda, he ransacked the woods and meadows, seeking among all plants those which approximated nearest to the nature of the nicotiana.
The early Jamestown settlers followed the Indian custom of planting the tobacco seed in hills as they did corn, although some probably followed the practice as described by Stevens and Liebault's Maison Rustique or The Country Farm, published in London in 1606: For to sow it, you must make a hole in the earth with your finger and that as deep as your finger is long, then you must cast into the same hole ten or twelve seeds of the said Nicotiana together, and fill up the hole again: for it is so small, as that if you should put in but four or five seeds the earth would choake it: and if the time be dry, you must water the place easily some five days after: And when the herb is grown out of the earth, inasmuch as every seed will have put up his sprout and stalk, and that the small thready roots are entangled the one within the other, you must with a great knife make a composs within the earth in the places about this plot where they grow and take up the earth and all together, and cast them into a bucket full of water, to the end that the earth may be separated, and the small and tender impes swim about the water; and so you shall sunder them one after another without breaking them.
The pipe seems as inseparable as the Koran from the follower of Mahomet. Barely three centuries ago, then, the first seeds of the Nicotiana tabacum germinated in European soil: now, who shall count the harvests? Less than three centuries ago, Raleigh attracted a crowd by sitting smoking at his door: now, the humblest bog-trotter of Ireland must be poor indeed who cannot own or borrow a pipe.
A complete story on the origin of the early varieties of tobacco would be a very significant contribution, since very little is known about them. Most writers agree that the tobacco cultivated by the English settlers was not the same Nicotiana rustica grown by the Indians, but Nicotiana tabacum, the type found growing in South America and the West Indies.
Guled uncovered his head, a member which in Africa is certainly made to go bare, and buttered himself with an unguent redolent of sheep's tail; and Ismail, the rais or captain of our "foyst," the Sahalah, applied himself to puffing his nicotiana out of a goat's shank-bone.
Method of Extraction from the Stomach. Use Stas-Otto process. Test. The contraction of the pupil which it causes. =Tobacco.= Nicotiana tabacum owes its poisonous properties to its alkaloid nicotine, a volatile, oily, amber-coloured liquid, with an acrid taste and ethereal odour; soluble in water, alcohol, ether, and chloroform.
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