ANTIQUITY OF TOBACCO-SMOKING 97 



Herodotus says that the Messagetse, or Scythians, 

 possessed a tree bearing a strange fruit which, when they 

 met together, they cast into the fire and inhaled its fumes 

 till they became intoxicated, in much the same way as the 

 Greeks did with wine. What this strange produce was we 

 learn in book IV., cap. 78, where he relates the story of 

 the Scythians making themselves drunk with hemp-seed. 

 They crept vrith it under their blankets, and, throwing it on 

 red-hot stones, inhaled the fumes arising therefrom. 

 Simple narrations such as these fall in quite naturally with 

 one's ideas of primitive man adapting himself to his 

 circumstances. The Father of History never indulges in 

 flights of fancy or creations of the imagination; it is enough 

 for him to render a straightforward account of such things 

 as came under his own eyes, or of events as they had been 

 related to him. But when we come to a modern writer 

 who tells a smoking-story of far-back times, relating, indeed, 

 to none other than the ' mighty hunter before the Lord,' 

 (enjoying, we may assume, a quiet pipe after a day's hard 

 riding across country), then doubt begins to take possession 

 of the mind, and we are inclined to let that tale go for 

 what it is worth. Lieutenant Walpole is responsible for 

 the story that, when he was at Mosul, there came into his 

 hands a very old Arabic manuscript, in the opening chapter 

 of which the ancient scribe declared that Nimrod used 

 tobacco. Application of the higher criticism to this relic of 

 antiquity would be quite out of place ; why, indeed, should 

 men seek to be wise above what is written? But let us 

 look a little farther into what Mr. Walpole has to narrate 

 of the people among whom he sojourned, respecting their 

 indulgence in the social pleasure of the pipe. From his 

 highly interesting work on The Ansayrii, or The Assassins 

 (published in 1851) we gather that while at Mosul he was 



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