252 NABCOTIC USAGES AND SUPEESTIXIONS 



ever, is this ancient process from indicating a mode of inhaling herbs, 

 in any sense equivalent to the American luxury by which it may be sup- 

 posed to have been superseded, that it is by no means banished, even 

 now, from the practise of ancient female herbalists and domestic 

 mediciners, whom I have known recommend the inhalation of the 

 fumes or steam of various plants, not by means of a tobacco pipe, 

 but through the spout of a teapot ! 



There is no question, however, that many plants have been em- 

 ployed as substitutes for tobacco, since the introduction of the prac- 

 tice of smoking. The slight astringency and diuretic qualities of 

 poli/tric hum and other Bryacece, led to their use formerly in medicines, 

 and the practice was once common, as I have been assured, in Annan- 

 dale, and other border districts of Scotland, and is not even now 

 wholly obsolete, of smoking the dried sphagnum latifolium, or the 

 obtusifolium and others of the mosses which abound in the marshy 

 bogs. So also the millefolium or yarrow, one of the various species 

 of the genus Achillea, and several of the herbs which from their 

 shape and the velvet surface of the leaves, are popularly known by the 

 name of mouse ear, have long supplied to the English rustic an 

 economic substitute for tobacco ; just as the sloe, hawthorn, sage, and 

 other leaves have furnished a native apology for the tea plant. But 

 the " time immemorial" to which such practice extends probably falls 

 far short of well ascertained dates when tobacco and the tobacco pipe 

 were both recognized as gifts of the new world to the old. But 

 it is curious to note, that one of the most anciently accredited 

 substitutes for tobacco : the coltsfoot, appears to have been employed 

 to adulterate it almost as soon as it came into use in England. Dame 

 Ursla, in Ben Jonson's " Bartholomew Fair," (1614,) thus addresses 

 her dull tapster : — " I can but hold life and soul together with this, and 

 a whiff of tobacco ab most, where's my pipe now ? not filled, 

 thou errant incubee! * • • Look too't sirrah, you were 

 best ; threepence a pipe full, I will ha' made, of all my whole half- 

 pound of tobaeco, and a quarter of a-pound of coltsfoot mix't with 

 it too, to itch [eke] it out. I that have dealt so long in the fire 

 will not be to seek in smoke now." 



The libraries of Canada furnish very slender means for dallying with 

 the Bibliography of the nicotian art. But some of the references 

 made above may be thought to bear on the subject, and the very 

 terms in which the royal author of the " Counterblaste" assails it as 

 a novelty of such recent origin " as this present age can very well 

 remember both the first author and forms of its introduction," seem 



