22 The Soverane Herbe 



is never compared to any European custom which, 

 though rare, would suggest itself at once to any writer 

 as the best means of explaining the Indian manner 

 of smoking. 



The laws and prohibitory penalties enacted against 

 smoking by European and Asiatic potentates still 

 further support this contention. To all parts of 

 Africa and Asia tobacco was introduced by Euro- 

 peans. There is a Chinese tradition that tobacco 

 was introduced into that country with the Yuen 

 Dynasty, about A.D. 1300. Beyond tradition there is 

 no support for this assertion, and it seems more likely 

 that tobacco was first carried there by the Dutch in 

 the beginning of the seventeenth century. Others 

 hold that the aboriginal American emigrated from 

 China, taking with him tobacco and the practice of 

 smoking it, thus regarding China as the birthplace of 

 smoking. This does not agree with the Chinese 

 traditional account of the introduction of tobacco 

 into the Celestial Empire, nor can the two theories 

 in any way be reconciled. And though there are 

 over forty varieties of the tobacco-plant now known, 

 the existence of none in the Old World can be traced 

 back to before 1500 A.D. 



There is, indeed, no reasonable doubt that tobacco 

 and smoking were unknown in Europe, Asia, or 

 Africa until brought from the New World. From 

 the West came the weed of glorious feature. It is 

 strange that meditative, philosophic tobacco should 

 come from the busy, active West ; it seems far more 

 like the offspring of the dreamy, poetic East. 



' Tobacco,' wrote Cowper, ' was not known in the 



