2 The Soverane Herbe 



rarest joys which fell to him, the first smoker. There 

 was, indeed, no such person. 



And to the true smoker's sense of the eternal 

 fitness of things this silence accords well with the 

 divinity of the herb. Nicotia had no birth, and 

 smoking no beginning ; they know not Time. With 

 the other herbs of the field tobacco rose from chaos, 

 and smoking had its being in the earliest and deepest 

 feelings of man's soul. 



The origin of the strange practice of inhaling the 

 fumes of tobacco must not be sought among the 

 pleasures of primitive man. It was as a religious 

 rite that smoking originated ; the burning of tobacco 

 was an expression of man's homage to the Great 

 Spirit. The burning of incense or spices has had 

 a place in the worship of all peoples from time 

 immemorial ; and as myrrh and frankincense were 

 offered in the East, so was tobacco in the West. 

 Among all the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, 

 from Cape Horn to Hudson's Bay, tobacco was 

 regarded as a sacred plant, as the special gift of the 

 gods to man. It was this fact that led European 

 writers, Spenser among them, to term tobacco on 

 its introduction the ' holy,' the ' divine ' herb. What 

 was local colour then is a mere euphemism now. It 

 was as incense that tobacco was first used by the 

 American Indians, the leaf being dried, powdered, 

 and then burnt as a sacrifice, as any aromatic herb 

 might be. 



The sacred character and use of tobacco were 

 noted by all the early travellers in America. Hariot, 

 in the first English account of the Indian practice 



