There are probably one or two indigoes indigenous in America, but ill defined, and often intermixed in cultivation with the species of the old world, and naturalized beyond the limits of cultivation. This interchange makes the matter too uncertain for me to venture upon any researches into their original habitat. Some authors have thought that I. Anil, Linnæus, was one of these species. Linnæus, however, says that his plant came from India (Mantissa, p. 273). The blue dye of the ancient Mexicans was extracted from a plant which, according to Hernandez’account,[660] differs widely from the indigoes.
Henna—Lawsonia alba, Lamarck (Lawsonia inermis and L. spinosa of different authors).
The custom among Eastern women of staining their nails red with the juice of henna-leaves dates from a remote antiquity, as ancient Egyptian paintings and mummies show.
It is difficult to know when and in what country this species was first cultivated to fulfil the requirements of a fashion as absurd as it is persistent, but it may be from a very early epoch, since the inhabitants of Babylon, Nineveh, and the towns of Egypt had gardens. It may be left to scholars to show whether the practice of staining the nails began in Egypt under this or that dynasty, before or after certain relations were established with Eastern nations. It is enough for our purpose to know that Lawsonia, a shrub belonging to the order of the Lythraceæ, is more or less wild in the warm regions of Western Asia and of Africa to the north of the equator.
I have in my possession specimens from India, Java, Timor, even from China[661] and Nubia, which are not said to be taken from cultivated plants, and others from Guiana and the West Indies, which are doubtless furnished by the imported species. Stocks found it indigenous in Beluchistan.[662] Roxburgh also considered it to be wild on the Coromandel[663] coast, and Thwaites[664] mentions it in Ceylon in a manner which seems to show that it is wild there. Clarke[665] says, “very common, and cultivated in India, perhaps wild in the eastern part.” It is possible that it spread into India from its original home, as into Amboyna[666] in the seventeenth century, and perhaps more recently into the West Indies,[667] in the wake of cultivation; for the plant is valued for the scent of its flowers, as well as for the dye, and is easily propagated by seed. There is the same doubt as to whether it is indigenous in Persia, Arabia, and Egypt (an essentially cultivated country), in Nubia, and even in Guinea, where specimens have been gathered.[668] It is even possible that the area of this shrub extends from India to Nubia. Such a wide geographical distribution is, however, always somewhat rare. The common names may furnish some indication.
A Sanskrit name, sakachera,[669] is attributed to the species, but as it has left no trace in the different modern languages of India, I am inclined to doubt its reality. The Persian name hanna is more widely diffused and retained than any other (hina of the Hindus, henneh and alhenna of the Arabs, kinna of the modern Greeks). That of cypros, used by the Syrians of the time of Dioscorides,[670] has not found so much favour. This fact supports the opinion that the species grew originally on the borders of Persia, and that its use as well as its cultivation spread from the East to the West, from Asia into Africa.
Tobacco—Nicotiana Tabacum, Linnæus; and other species of Nicotiana.
At the time of the discovery of America, the custom of smoking, of snuff-taking, or of chewing tobacco was diffused over the greater part of this vast continent. The accounts of the earliest travellers, of which the famous anatomist Tiedemann[671] has made a very complete collection, show that the inhabitants of South America did not smoke, but chewed tobacco or took snuff, except in the district of La Plata, Uruguay, and Paraguay, where no form of tobacco was used. In North America, from the Isthmus of Panama and the West Indies as far as Canada and California, the custom of smoking was universal, and circumstances show that it was also very ancient. Pipes, in great numbers and of wonderful workmanship, have been discovered in the tombs of the Aztecs in Mexico[672] and in the mounds of the United States; some of them represent animals foreign to North America.[673]
As the tobacco plant is an annual which gives a great quantity of seeds, it was easy to sow and to cultivate or naturalize them more or less in the neighbourhood of dwellings, but it must be noted that different species of the genus Nicotiana were employed in different parts of America, which shows that they had not all the same origin. Nicotiana Tabacum, commonly cultivated, was the most widely diffused, and sometimes the only one in use in South America and the West Indies. The use of tobacco was introduced into La Plata, Paraguay,[674] and Uruguay by the Spaniards, consequently we must look further to the north for the origin of the plant. De Martius does not think it was indigenous in Brazil,[675] and he adds that the ancient Brazilians smoked the leaves of a species belonging to their country known to botanists as Nicotiana Langsdorfii. When I went into the question in 1855,[676] I had not been able to discover any wild specimens of Nicotiana Tabacum except those sent by Blanchet from the province of Bahia, numbered 3223, a. No author, either before or since that time, has been more fortunate, and I see that Messrs. Flückiger and Hanbury, in their excellent work on vegetable drugs,[677] say positively, “The common tobacco is a native of the new world, though not now known in a wild state.” I venture to gainsay this assertion, although the wild nature of a plant may always be disputed in the case of a plant which spreads so easily from cultivation.
We find in herbaria a number of specimens gathered in Peru without indication that they were cultivated or that they grew near plantations. Boissier’s herbarium contains two specimens collected by Pavon, from different localities.[678] Pavon says in his flora that the species grows in the moist warm forests of the Peruvian Andes, and that it is cultivated. But—and this is more significant—Edouard André gathered specimens in the republic of Ecquador at Saint Nicholas, on the western slope of the volcano of Corazon in a virgin forest. These he was kind enough to send me. They are evidently the tall variety (four to six feet) of N. Tabacum, with the upper leaves narrow and acuminate, as they are represented in the plates of Hayne and Miller.[679] The lower leaves are wanting. The flower, which gives the true characters of the species, is certainly that of N. Tabacum, and it is well known that the height of this plant and the breadth of the leaves vary in cultivation.[680] It is very possible that its original country extended north as far as Mexico, as far south as Bolivia, and eastward to Venezuela.