Secondly, into saccharine substances, as cane-sugar, treacle, honey, liquorice, and beetroot dregs.
Thirdly, into salts and earths, as nitre, common salt, sal ammoniac, or hydrochlorate of ammonia, nitrate of ammonia, carbonate of ammonia, the alkalies, as potash, soda, and lime; sulphate of magnesia, sulphate of soda or glauber salts, yellow ochre, umber, fuller’s earth, Venetian red, sand, and sulphate of iron.
And the experience of the excise, as may be gathered from the evidence of Mr. Phillips before the committee of adulteration, harmonizes with the above list. “With regard to tobacco,” he says, “we have found in cut tobacco, sugar, liquorice, gum catechu, saltpetre, and various nitrates; yellow ochre, Epsom salts, glauber salts, green copperas, red sandstone, wheat, oatmeal, malt cummings, chicory, and the following leaves—coltsfoot, rhubarb, chicory, endive, oak, elm; and in fancy tobacco, I once found lavender, and a wort called mugwort. It is a fragrant herb, suggestive rather of the nutmeg. In roll tobacco we have found rhubarb leaves, endive and dock leaves, sugar, liquorice, and a dye made of logwood and sulphate of iron.”
Let consumers of tobacco console themselves, however, in the face of this formidable list, by the assurance of the eminent experimenter on articles of food, &c., before named, that “not one of the forty samples of manufactured cut tobacco which he examined was adulterated with any foreign leaf, or with any insoluble or organic extraneous substance of any description other than with sugar, or some other saccharine matter, which was present in several instances.”
Leaving adulterations to take care of themselves, we find that an article, of very ancient use, is still occasionally smoked instead of the Virginian weed. The plant referred to is coltsfoot (Tussilago farfar, Linn.), a very common weed on chalky and gravelly soils. Pliny refers to it, and directs that the foliage should be burned, and the smoke arising from it drawn into the mouth through a reed and swallowed. These leaves have long been smoked for chest complaints, and are said to form the chief ingredient in British herb tobacco.
The leaves of milfoil or yarrow (Achillœa millefolium), another plant equally common with the last, have been recommended to smokers in lieu of tobacco, and occasionally used for that purpose. Added to beer, they render it heady or more intoxicating.
Leaves of rhubarb are occasionally smoked by those who are too poor to furnish themselves with a regular supply of tobacco, and those who have used them state, that, although devoid of strength, they are not a bad substitute when tobacco is not to be obtained. For the same purpose they are collected and used in Thibet, and on the slopes of the Himalayas.
The leaves of a plant common in marshes and boggy soils in Europe and North America, called Bogbean (Menyanthes trifoliata, Linn.) are used in the north of Europe when hops are scarce, to give a bitter flavour to beer, and have been recommended and adopted as a tobacco substitute.
An agricultural labourer near Blois, pretends that the leaves of the beet make an excellent tobacco.
Undescribed plants called Akil and Trouna, are used by the Arabs of Algeria to render their tobacco milder.