excellent nets, fish-hooks, and fishing-tackle. There were tame birds
about the houses, and dogs which did not bark. "Mermaids," too, the
admiral saw on the coasts, but thought them "not so like ladies as they
are painted."

Speaking of the Indians of the coast near the Rio del Sol, he says that
they are "very gentle, without knowing what evil is, neither killing nor
stealing." He describes the frank generosity of the people of Marien, and
the honour they thought it to be asked to give anything, in terms which
may remind his readers of the doctrines maintained by Christians in
respect of giving.


DISCOVERY OF TOBACCO; ITS PECULIAR EFFECTS.

It is interesting to observe the way in which, at this point of the
narrative, a new product is introduced to the notice of the old world, a
product that was hereafter to become, not only an unfailing source of
pleasure to a large section of the male part of mankind, from the highest
to the lowest, but was also to distinguish itself as one of those
commodities for revenue, which are the delight of statesmen, the great
financial resource of modern nations, and which afford a means of indirect
taxation that has, perhaps, nourished many a war, and prevented many a
revolution. Two discoverers, whom the admiral had sent out from the Puerto
de Mares (one of them being a learned Jew, who could speak Hebrew,
Chaldee, and some Arabic, and would have been able to discourse, as
Columbus probably thought, with any of the subjects of the Grand Khan, if
he had met them), found that the men of the country they came to
investigate, indulged in a "fumigation" of a peculiar kind. The smoke in
question was absorbed into the mouth through a charred stick, and was