CHAPTEK I. 



THE TOBACCO PLANT. 



OBACCO is a hardy flowering annual* plant, 

 growing freely in a moist fertile soil and requiring 

 the most thorough culture in order to secure the 

 finest form and quality of leaf. It is a native of the 

 tropics and under the intense rays of a vertical sun develops 

 its finest and most remarkable flavor which far surpasses the 

 varieties grown in a temperate region. It however readily 

 adapts itself to soil and climate growing through a wide 

 range of temperature from the Equator to Moscow in Kus- 

 sia in latitude .56, and through all the intervening range 

 of climate f. 



The plant varies in height according to species and locality ; 

 the largest varieties reaching an altitude of ten or twelve feet, 

 in others not growing more than two or three feet from the 

 ground. Botanists have enumerated between forty and fifty 

 varieties of the tobacco plant who class them all among the 

 narcotic poisons. When properly cultivated the plant ripens 

 in a few weeks growing with a rapidity hardly equaled by 

 any "product either temperate or tropical. Of the large 

 number of varieties cultivated scarcely more than one-half 

 are grown to any great extent while many of them are hardly 

 known outside of the limit of cultivation. Tobacco is a 

 strong growing plant resisting heat and drought to a far 



* The greater number of the species are annual plants ; but two at least are perennial ; the 

 Ulcotiana fruticosa, which Is a shrub, a native of the Cape of Good Hope, and of China; and 

 If. urens, a native of South America. 



tTatham says tha.t the tobacco plant ia peculiarly adapted for an agricultural comparison 

 of climates. 



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