ORIGIN OF THE TOBACCO PLANT 125 



aroma, and has nothing to do with the flavour of 

 tobacco, which is due to very minute quantities of 

 special volatile bodies similar to those which give a 

 scent to hay. 



Most people are acquainted with the three ways of 

 " taking tobacco " that of taking its smoke into the 

 mouth, and more or less into the lungs, that of chewing 

 the prepared leaf, and that of snuffing up the powdered 

 leaf into the nose, whence it ultimately passes to the 

 stomach. A fourth modification of the snuffing and 

 chewing methods exists in what is called the "snuff 

 stick. 1 " According to the novelist, Mrs. Hodgson 

 Burnett, the country women in Kentucky use a short 

 stick, like a brush, which they dip into a paperfull of 

 snuff; they then rub the powder on to the gums. 

 Snuff- taking has almost disappeared in " polite society " 

 in this country within the past twenty years, but 

 snuffing and chewing are still largely practised by 

 those whose occupation renders it impossible or 

 dangerous for them to carry a lighted pipe or cigar 

 such as sailors and fishermen and workers in many 

 kinds of factories and engine-rooms. 



One of the most curious questions in regard to the 

 history of tobacco is that as to whether its use origin- 

 ated independently in Asia or was introduced there by 

 Europeans. It is largely cultivated and used for 

 smoking throughout the East from Turkey to China 

 including Persia and India on the way and special 

 varieties of tobacco, the Turkish, the Persian, and the 

 Manilla are well known, and only produced in the East, 

 whilst special forms of pipe, such as the " hukah " or 

 " hooka," the " hubble-bubble," and the small Chinese 

 pipe are distinctively Oriental. Not only that, but the 

 islanders of the Far East are inveterate smokers of 

 tobacco, and some of them have peculiar methods of 

 obtaining the smoke, as, for instance, certain North 

 Australians who employ " a smoke-box " made of a 



