The Beginning of Smoking 21 



pipe to a picture or carving of pre-EHzabethan times. 

 Nothing is easier to add, and to give the whole an air 

 of verisimilitude. To conclude from a pipe on an 

 ancient Irish monument that smoking was practised 

 in the twelfth century is as reasonable as to argue from 

 the Cawdor chimney-piece that foxes smoked tobacco 

 in the reign of Henry VIII. 



Perhaps grey lichen and coltsfoot were smoked 

 medicinally in England before tobacco was intro- 

 duced. But these were as strictly remedies and 

 medicinal as is the inhalation of steam in bronchitis. 

 They no more prove the antiquity of tobacco- 

 smoking in England than the ancient use of infusions 

 of herbs as medicines proves the use of tea in the 

 England of Alfred. It is true that lichen is still 

 smoked in Scotland and coltsfoot in England, but 

 peasants only resort to these herbs when they are 

 unable to procure tobacco. 



But the most conclusive proof that smoking of 

 herbs, much less of tobacco, was unknown in the Old 

 World before the introduction of the habit from the 

 New is that nowhere is the practice referred to by 

 historians or poets. Further, the American practice 

 of smoking is so minutely described by writers of the 

 sixteenth century, and later, on it becoming common 

 in Europe, so strongly condemned, the use of the 

 foreign weed being repeatedly referred to as an inno- 

 vation, that it is impossible to believe that smoking 

 in any shape or form was a common or even an occa- 

 sional custom. Even the inhalation of herbal fumes 

 as medicine must have been much less common than 

 has been supposed, as the practice of the Indians 



