, from Arabic _beii_, _bai_, is "house." The chance
that three such words should be identical in the dissimilar languages
of Africa and America, is _nil_. The words are African, though
represented as belonging to the spoken language of the New World.
Moreover, Ramon Pane, in the account he wrote for Columbus of the
Indian religion, gives as Indian words, the Mande _toto_, "frog," and
the Malinke _kobo_, "bug." What is more important, he imputes to the
Indians, a knowledge of the terrible West African itch, or _craworaw_,
which he calls by the supposed Indian name _caracaracol_. The critic
faces a dilemma. Either Ramon Pane lied, or he told the truth. Either
he fabricated stories of Indians, which he drew from books or
manuscript relations by Spanish and Portuguese traders, who were
writing about Negroes in Africa, or there had been in Hispaniola, a
pre-Columbian colony of European adventurers, with their African
slaves, who taught the Indians the Negro words for "farm, gold, frog,
bug, itch," etc., and also African folk-lore. No other hypothesis is
possible.

{Transcriber's Note: The following paragraphs contain a number of
characters with diacritical marks which are represented as follows:
[=a] a-macron
[=o] o-macron
[=e] e-macron
[>e] e-caron
[>z] z-caron}

The documentary and philological history of tobacco smoking and the
cultivation of edible roots, shows additional convincing evidence of
the influence of Africa on the culture of America in the colonial
period. Columbus never saw the Indians smoking tobacco. According to
the _Journal of the First Voyage_, on October 15, 1492, an Indian
brought him a ball of earth and certain precious dried leaves. On
November 16, two Spaniards reported that the Indians, carrying
firebrands and leaves, used them to "take incense." In the _Journal of
the Second Voyage_, Columbus (this part of the Journal is definitely
ascribed to him by his son) writes of Indians spreading powder on a
table, and sniffing it through a forked reed, thereby becoming
intoxicated. Now the first account is suspiciously like a book-story
of Oriental hashish-taking.--the second has no implication of smoking
at all, while the third describes nothing but the process of taking a
sternutatory. Indeed this last account is clearly based on a book
account, in which there was a play on the Arabic words _tubb[=a]q_
"styptic