Nicotiana rustica, Linnæus, a species with yellow flowers, very different from Tabacum,[681] and which yields a coarse kind of tobacco, was more often cultivated by the Mexicans and the native tribes north of Mexico. I have a specimen brought from California by Douglas in 1837, a time when colonists were still few; but American authorities do not admit that the plant is wild, and Dr. Asa Gray says that it sows itself in waste places.[682] This was perhaps the case with the specimens in Boissier’s herbarium, gathered in Peru by Pavon, and which he does not mention in the Peruvian flora. The species grows in abundance about Cordova in the Argentine Republic,[683] but from what epoch is unknown. From the ancient use of the plant and the home of the most analogous species, the probabilities are in favour of a Mexican, Texan, or Californian origin.
Several botanists, even Americans, have believed that the species came from the old world. This is certainly a mistake, although the plant has spread here and there even into our forests, and sometimes in abundance,[684] having escaped from cultivation. Authors of the sixteenth century spoke of it as a foreign plant introduced into gardens and sometimes spreading from them.[685] It occurs in some herbaria under the names of N. tartarica, turcica, or sibirica; but these are garden-grown specimens, and no botanist has found the species in Asia, or on the borders of Asia, with any appearance of wildness.
This leads me to refute a widespread and more persistent error, in spite of what I proved in 1855, namely, that of regarding some species ill described from cultivated specimens as natives of the old world, of Asia in particular. The proofs of an American origin are so numerous and consistent that, without entering much into detail, I may sum them up as follows:—
A. Out of fifty species of the genus Nicotiana found in a wild state, two only are foreign to America; namely, N. suavolens of New Holland, with which is joined N. rotundifolia of the same country, and that which Ventinat had wrongly styled N. undulata; and N. fragans, Hooker, of the Isle of Pines, near New Caledonia, which differs very little from the preceding.
B. Though the Asiatic people are great lovers of tobacco, and have from a very early epoch sought the smoke of certain narcotic plants, none of them made use of tobacco before the discovery of America. Tiedemann has distinctly proved this fact by thorough researches into the writings of travellers in the Middle Ages.[686] He even quotes for a later epoch, not long after the discovery of America, between 1540 and 1603, the fact that several travellers, some of whom were botanists, such as Belon and Rauwolf, who travelled through the Turkish and Persian empires, observing their customs with much attention, have not once mentioned tobacco. It was evidently introduced into Turkey at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the Persians soon received it from the Turks. The first European who mentions the smoking of tobacco in Persia is Thomas Herbert, in 1626. No later travellers have omitted to notice the use of the hookah as well established. Olearius describes this apparatus, which he saw in 1633. The first mention of tobacco in India is in 1605,[687] and it is probable that it was of European introduction. It was first introduced at Arracan and Pegu, in 1619, according to the traveller Methold.[688] There are doubts about Java, because Rumphius, a very accurate observer, who wrote in the second half of the seventeenth century, says[689] that, according to the tradition of some old people, tobacco had been employed as a medicine before the arrival of the Portuguese in 1496, and that only the practice of smoking it had been communicated by the Europeans. Rumphius adds, it is true, that the name tabaco or tambuco, which is in use in all these places, is of foreign origin. Sir Stamford Raffles,[690] in his numerous historical researches on Java, gives, on the other hand, the year 1601 as the date of the introduction of tobacco into Java. The Portuguese had certainly discovered the coasts of Brazil between 1500 and 1504, but Vasco di Gama and his successors went to Asia round the Cape, or through the Red Sea, so that they could hardly have established frequent or direct communications between America and Java. Nicot had seen the plant in Portugal in 1560, so that the Portuguese probably introduced it into Asia in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Thunberg affirms[691] that the use of tobacco was introduced into Japan by the Portuguese, and according to early travellers quoted by Tiedemann, this was at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Lastly, the Chinese have no original and ancient sign for tobacco; their paintings on china in the Dresden collection often present, from the year 1700 and never before that date, details relating to tobacco,[692] and Chinese students are agreed that Chinese works do not mention the plant before the end of the sixteenth century.[693] If it be remembered with what rapidity the use of tobacco has spread wherever it has been introduced, these data about Asia have an incontestable force.
C. The common names of tobacco confirm its American origin. If there had been any indigenous species in the old world there would be a great number of different names; but, on the contrary, the Chinese, Japanese, Javanese, Indian, Persian, etc., names are derived from the American names, petum, or tabak, tabok, tamboc, slightly modified. It is true that Piddington gives Sanskrit names, dhumrapatra and tamrakouta,[694] but Adolphe Pictet informs me that the first of these names, which is not in Wilson’s dictionary, means only leaf for smoking, and appears to be of modern composition; while the second is probably no older, and seems to be a modern modification of the American names. The Arabic word docchan simply means smoke.[695]
Lastly, we must inquire into the two so-called Asiatic Nicotianæ. The one, called by Lehmann Nicotiana chinensis, came from the Russian botanist Fischer, who said it was Chinese. Lehmann said he had seen it in a garden. Now, it is well known how often an erroneous origin is attributed to plants grown by horticulturists, and besides, from the description, it seems that it was simply N. Tabacum, of which the seeds had perhaps come from China.[696] The second species is N. persica, Lindley, figured in the Botanical Register (pl. 1592), of which the seeds had been sent from Ispahan to the Horticultural Society of London, as those of the best tobacco cultivated in Persia, that of Schiraz. Lindley did not observe that it corresponded exactly to N. alata, drawn three years before by Link and Otto[697] from a plant in the gardens at Berlin. The latter was grown from seed sent by Sello from Southern Brazil. It is certainly a Brazilian species, with a white elongated corolla, allied to N. suaveolens of New Holland. Thus the tobacco cultivated sometimes in Persia along with the common species, is of American origin, as I declared in my Geographical Botany of 1855. I do not understand how this species was introduced into Persia. It must have been from seed taken from a garden, or brought by chance from America, and it is not likely that its cultivation is common in Persia, for Olivier and Bruguière, and other naturalists who have observed the tobacco plantations in that country, make no mention of it.
From all these reasons I conclude that no species of tobacco is a native of Asia. They are all American, except N. suaveolens of New Holland, and N. fragrans of the Isle of Pines to the south of New Caledonia.
Several Nicotianæ, besides N. tabacum and N. rustica, have been cultivated here and there by savages, or as a curiosity by Europeans. It is strange that so little notice is taken of these attempts, by means of which very choice tobacco might be obtained. The species with white flowers would yield probably a light and perfumed tobacco, and as some smokers seek the strongest tobaccos and the most disagreeable to non-smokers, I would recommend to their notice N. angustifolia of Chili, which the natives call tabaco del diablo.[698]