t, and sent plants to Spain, as part
of the spoils and treasures of his new-found World."

Oviedo[4] is the first author who gives a clear account of smoking
among the Indians of Hispaniola[5]. He alludes to it as one of their
evil customs and used by them to produce insensibility. Their mode of
using it was by inhalation and expelling the smoke through the
nostrils by means of a hollow forked cane or hollow reed. Oviedo
describes them as
"about a span long; and when used the forked ends
are inserted in the nostrils, the other end being applied to
the burning leaves of the herb, using the herb in this
manner stupefied them producing a kind of intoxication."

[Footnote 4: Historia General de los Indios 1526.]

[Footnote 5: St. Domingo.]

[Illustration: Primitive pipe.]

Of the early accounts of the plant and its use, Beckman a German
writer says:--

"In 1496, Romanus Pane, a Spanish monk, whom Columbus, on
his second departure from America, had left in that country,
published the first account of tobacco with which he became
acquainted in St. Domingo. He gave it the name of Cohoba
Cohobba, Gioia. In 1535, the negroes had already habituated
themselves to the use of tobacco, and cultivated it in the
plantations of their masters. Europeans likewise already
smoked it."

An early writer thus alludes to the use of tobacco among the East
Indians:--

"The East Indians do use to make little balls of the juice
of the hearbe tobaco and the ashes of cockle-shells wrought
up together, and dryed in the shadow, and in their travaile
they place one of the balls between their neather lip and
their teeth, sucking the same continually, and letting down
the moysture, and it keepeth them both from hunger and
thirst for the space of three or four days."

Oviedo says of the implements used by the Indians in smoking:--

"The hollow cane used by them is called tobaco and that that
name is not given to the plant or to the stupor caused by
its use."

A writer alluding to the same subject says:--

"The name tobacco is supposed to be derived from the Indian
tobaccos, given by the Caribs to the pipe in which they
smoked the plant."

Others derive it from Tabasco, a province of Mexico; others from the
island of Tobago one of the Caribbees; and others from Tobasco i