142 ORIGIN OF CULTIVATED PLANTS 



ancient use of the plant and the home of the most analo- 

 gous species, the probabilities are in favour of a Mexican, 

 Texan, or Californian origin. 



Several botanists, even Americans, have believed that 

 the species came from the old world. This is certainly 

 a mistake, although the plant has spread here and there 

 even into our forests, and sometimes in abundance,^ 

 having escaped from cultivation. Authors of the six- 

 teenth century spoke of it as a foreign plant introduced 

 into gardens and sometimes spreading from them.^ It 

 occurs in some herbaria under the names of i\r. tar- 

 tarica, turcica, or sibirica ; but these are garden-grown 

 specimens, and no botanist has found the species in Asia, 

 or on the borders of Asia, with any appearance of wildness. 



This leads me to refute a widespread and more per- 

 sistent error, in spite of what I proved in 1855, namely, 

 that of regarding some species ill described from culti- 

 vated specimens as natives of the old world, of Asia in 

 particular. The proofs of an American origin are so 

 numerous and consistent that, without entering much 

 into detail, I may sum them iip as follows : — 



A. Out of fifty species of the genus Nicotiana found 

 in a wild state, two only are foreign to America ; namely, 

 N suavolens of New Holland, with which is joined 

 N. rotundifolia of the same country, and that which 

 Ventinat had wrongly styled K undulata ; and iV. fra- 

 ga/ns, Hooker, of the Isle of Pines, near New Caledonia, 

 which differs very little from the preceding. 



B. Though the Asiatic people are great lovers of 

 tobacco, and have from a very early epoch sought the 

 smoke of certain narcotic plants, none of them made use 

 of tobacco before the discovery of America. Tiedemann 

 has distinctly proved this fact by thorough researches 

 into the writings of travellers in the Middle Ages.* He 

 even quotes for a later epoch, not long after the dis- 

 covery of America, between 1540 and 1603, the fact that 



' Bulliard, Herhier de France. 



'' Caasalpinus, lib. viii. cap. 44; Banhin, Hist., iii. p. 630. 



• Tiedemann, Qeschichte des Tabalcs (1854), p. 208. Two years 

 earlier, Volz, Beitrage zwr CuHmrgeschichte, had collected a number 

 of facts relative to the introduction of tobacco into different countries. 



