Turkey, Persia, or Russia?]

[Footnote 3: Book iv., p. 5., ed. 8vo., Boston.]

[Footnote 4: Virginia.]

The tobacco-plant does not appear to be indigenous to any part of Asia.
Sir John Chardin, who was in Persia about the year 1670, relates in his
travels, that tobacco had been cultivated there from time immemorial.
"Honest John Bell" (of Antermony), who travelled in China about 1720,
asserts that it is reported the Chinese have had the use of tobacco for
many ages. Rumphius, who resided at Amboyna towards the end of the
seventeenth century, found it universal over the East Indies, even in
countries where Spaniards or Portuguese had never been. The evidence
furnished by these authors, although merely traditional, is the
strongest which I am aware of in favour of an Asiatic origin for the use
of tobacco.

Mr. Lane, on the other hand, speaks of the "introduction of tobacco into
the East, in the beginning of the seventeenth century of our era,"
(_Arabian Nights_, Note 22. cap. iii.), "a fact that has been completely
established by the researches of Dr. Meyer of Konigsberg, who discovered
in the works of an old Hindostanee physician a passage in which tobacco
is distinctly stated to have been introduced into India by the Frank
nations in the year 1609." (Vide _An Essay on Tobacco_, by H.W. Cleland,
M.D. 4to. Glasgow, 1840, to which I am indebted for the information
embodied in this reply to Z.A.Z., and to which I would beg to refer him
for much curious matter on the subject of tobacco.)

My own impression is, that the common use of _hemp_ in the East, for