142 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS. 



ancient use of the plant and the home of the most analo- 

 gous species, the probahilities are in favour of a Mexican, 

 Texan, or Californian origin. 



Sevei'al botanists, even Americans, have believed that 

 the species came from the old world. This is certainly 

 a mistake, although the plant has spread here and there 

 even into our forests, and sometimes in abundance,^ 

 having escaped from cultivation. Authoi's of the six- 

 teenth century spoke of it as a foreign plant introduced 

 into gardens and sometimes spreading from them.^ It 

 occurs in some herbaria under the names of N. tar- 

 tarica, turcica, or sibirica ; but these are garden-grown 

 specimens, and no botanist has found the species in Asia, 

 or on the borders of Asia, with any appearance of wildness. 



This leads me to refute a widespread and more per- 

 sistent error, in spite of what I proved in 1855, namely, 

 that of regarding some species ill described from culti- 

 vated specimens as natives of the old world, of Asia in 

 pai'ticular. The proofs of an American origin are so 

 numerous and consistent that, without entering much 

 into detail, I may sum them up as follows : 



A. Out of fifty species of the genus Nicotiana found 

 in a wild state, two only are foreign to America ; namely, 

 N suavolens of New Holland, with which is joined 

 iV. rotundifolia of the same country, and that which 

 Ventinat had wrongly styled N. undidata; and N. fra- 

 gans, Hooker, of the Isle of Pines, near New Caledonia, 

 which differs very little from the preceding. 



B. Though the Asiatic people are great lovers of 

 tobacco, and have from a very early epoch sought the 

 smoke of certain narcotic plants, none of them made use 

 of tobacco before the discovery of America. Tiedemann 

 has distinctly proved this fact by thorough researches 

 into the writiiio-s of travellers in the Middle As^es.^ He 

 even quotes for a later epoch, not long after the dis- 

 covery of America, between 1540 and 1003, the fact that 



' Bulliard, Herhier de France. 



Caesalpinus, lib. viii. cap. 44; Banhin, Hist,, iii. p. 630. 



Tiedemann, Geschichte des Tabaks (1854), p. 208. Two years 

 enrlier, Yolz, Beitrage zur Culturgeschichte, had collected a number 

 of facts relative to the introduction of tobacco into different countries. 



