38 “ORIGIN OF THE PLANT. 
Virginia is a native production of the country; but whether 
it was found in a state of natural growth there, or a plant 
cultivated by the Indian natives, is a point of which we are 
not informed, nor which ever can be farther elucidated than 
by the corroboration of historical facts and conjectures. I 
have been thirty years ago, and the greatest part of my time 
during that period, intimately acquainted with the interior 
parts of America; and have been much in the unsettled parts 
of the country, among those kinds of soil which are favora- 
ble to the cultivation of tobacco; but I do not recollect one 
single instance where I have met with tobacco growing wild 
in the woods, although I have often found a few spontaneous 
lants about the arable.and trodden grounds of deserted 
lishitatone: This circumstance, as well as that of its being 
now, and having been, cultivated by the natives at the period 
of European discoveries, inclines towards a supposition that 
this plant is not anative of North America, but may possibly 
have found its way thither with the earliest migrations from 
some distant land. This might, indeed, have easily been the 
case from South America, by way of the Isthmus of Panama; 
and the foundation of the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations 
(who we have reasons to consider as descendants from the 
Tloseolians, and to have migrated to the eastward of the 
river Mississippi, about the time of the Spanish conquest of 
Mexico by Cortez), seems to have afforded one fair oppor- 
tunity for its dissemination.” 
The first knowledge which the English discoverers had ‘of 
the plant was in 1565 when they found it growing in Florida, 
one hundred and seventy-three years after it was first dis- 
covered by Columbus on the island of Cuba. Sir John 
Hawkins says of its use in Florida :— 
“The Floridians, when they travel, have a kind of herb 
dried, which with a cane and an earthen cup in the end, with 
fire and the dried herbs put together, do suke through the 
cane the smoke thereof, which smoke satisfieth their hunger, 
and therewith they live four or five dayes without meat or 
drinke, and this all the Frenchmen used for this purpose: yet 
do they holde opinion withall, that it causeth water and 
steame to void from their stomacks.” 
This preparation might not have been tobacco as the 
Indians smoke a kind of bark which they scrape from the 
killiconick, an aromatic shrub, in form resembling the willow; 
