JAMAICA. 



BULLETIN 



OF THE 



BOTANICAL DEPARTMENT. 



New Series.] MARCH, 1901. „ \ ~ 



Part III. 



TOBACCO. 



When Columbu9 landed in 1492 in the West Indies he found the 

 natives smoking a herb wrapt in a maize leaf, and the name of the 

 herb was Tobago. In 1560 Jean Nicot distributed p'ants raised from 

 seed to various parts of Europe. These two events give us the clue to 

 the popular and scientific names of a drug the cultivation and prepara- 

 tion of which have now attained such enormous importance that 

 Governments are supported by the revenue derived from its taxation, 

 and colossal fortunes are made by its sale. Some idea of the scale on 

 which the industry is carried on may be gathered from the statistics 

 recently published in the " Year-book of the United States Department 

 of Agriculture for 1899," where we read that during that year 

 266,661,752 pounds of tobacco, 4,542,016,570 cigars and 4,590,388,430 

 cigarettes were prepared in the United States elone, yielding a revenue 

 to the Government of 52,043,^59*05 dollars. 



Small wonder then that the cultivators of so valuable a plant have- 

 shown great interest in all the processes of raising, planting, manur- 

 ing and gathering the crop, and of drying, curing and preparing it for 

 market ; or that consternation has arisen in their midst at the origin 

 and spread of a disease which attack the golden leaf, and bids fair to 

 ruin the crop in some districts. It happens, moreover, that biological 

 problems of wide significance are arising in connection with the com- 

 plex art of fermenting the leaf so as to obtain the best flavour and 

 strength, as well as in regard to the "Mosaic disease" above referred 

 to, and the experience of Dutch growers, of which an excellent account 

 is now to hand in Koning's " Der Tabak, Studien ueber seine Kultur 

 undBiologie" (Amsterdam and Leipzig : W. Engelmann, 1900), show& 

 that the employment of scientifically trained botanists in the technical 

 laboratories of tobacco plantations is likely to be as usual an event 

 in the future as in breweries and bacteriological laboratories. 



The tobacco plant is exceedingly small in the seedling stage — eighteen 

 thimblefuls of seed suffice for a hectare, i.e., two and a half acres o£ 



