174 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



themselves at every step. Even if written records were wanting, 

 the ancient American smoking implements which enrich the mu- 

 seums of this country and Europe would enable us to assert the 

 general use of tobacco throughout the New World. Combining 

 the written and unwritten records, our information on this point 

 is complete. On the southern continent, although pre-Columbian 

 pipes are occasionally found, smoking was not so extensively 

 practiced as in the north. Still, several varieties of the tobacco 

 plant occur here, and the natives were doubtless well acquainted 

 with its use. Cabral, in 1515, observed in Brazil the practice of 

 chewing tobacco, and on the western coast the abundance of 

 small mortars, carved like the mound pipes of the Mississippi 

 Valley in the shape of various animals, attest the extensive use of 

 tobacco as snuff. Leaving South America and crossing the tenth 

 degree of north latitude, we approach the native land of the pipe. 

 A province of Yucatan is thought by some to have given a name 

 to the tobacco plant. A tubular pipe occurs in the sculptures of 

 Palenque. In Mexico the common custom of smoking was noted 

 by Cortes in 1519, and the truth of his statement is evinced by 

 the quantities of elaborately decorated clay pipes since unearthed 

 in that country, as well as by some of the pictured figures of the 

 ancient manuscripts. Pipes of clay or stone are found in abun- 

 dance throughout the United States, those from the mounds, sculp- 

 tured in the form of various quadrupeds and birds, and occasion- 

 ally of men. being among the most interesting examples of native 

 art. Still farther north the great narcotic had established its 

 sway, prior to the advent of Europeans, beyond the Great Lakes, 

 in the far Northwest, and in the East, where the French gave to a 

 tribe of inordinate smokers the name of Petuns, from petune, a 

 native name of the tobacco plant. 



The use of tobacco excited in the first Europeans who wit- 

 nessed it feelings of astonishment and disgust. If Montesquieu 

 is to be believed, the Spanish casuists of the fifteenth century of- 

 fered to the public conscience, in extenuation of the enslavement 

 of the Indians, the fact, among others, that they smoked tobacco. 

 There is other evidence to show that the early explorers of the 

 New World regarded the custom of smoking as the extremity of 

 barbarism; nor have advocates of this view been lacking from 

 that day to this. But, in spite of all objections, tobacco has ex- 

 tended its reign over the entire earth ; it is an important source 

 of revenue to the most enlightened of modern governments ; it 

 numbers among its devotees men of all races and of all ranks ; it 

 solaces the dreary life of the Eskimo and of the Central African 

 savage ; but a little while ago it furnished inspiration to the genius 

 of one of the world's great poets. Concerning the adoption by 

 civilized people of a barbarous custom like that under discussion 



