tobacco field has the
appearance of a vast flower garden, the tiny blossoms exhaling their
fragrance and the entire plant emitting odors as rare and as delicate
as the most fragrant exotic. In the tropics the finest tobacco
plantations are found, as nature is more lavish, not only in the
richness of the soil, but in the variety of the vegetable products.
Here the tobacco plant attains its finest form and most delicately
flavored leaves. The hues of the flowers are brighter and their
fragrance sweeter. In the tropics the tobacco field may be scented
from afar, as its odors are wafted on the breeze. In its native home
it flourishes and matures as readily as the more common kinds of
vegetation, while it affords the planter a larger revenue than many of
the more useful of nature's products.

CHAPTER XI.

VARIETIES.

The tobacco plant almost vies with the palm in the number of
varieties; botanists having enumerated as many as forty, which by no
means includes the entire number now being cultivated. The plant shows
also a great variety of forms, leaves, color of flowers, and texture.
Each kind has some peculiar feature or quality not found in another;
thus, one variety will have large leaves, while another will have
small ones; one kind leaves flowers of a pink or yellow color, another
white; one variety will produce a leaf black or brown, another yellow
or dark red. The following list includes nearly all of the principal
varieties now cultivated:--Connecticut seed leaf (broad and narrow
leaf), New York seed leaf, Pennsylvania (Duck Island), Virginia and
Maryland (Pryor and Frederick, James River, etc.), North Carolina
(Yellow Orinoco, and Gooch or Pride of Granville, etc.), Ohio Seed
leaf (broad leaf), Ohio leaf (Thick Set, Pear Tree, Burley, and
White), Texas, Louisiana (Perique), Florida, Kentucky, Missouri,
Wisconsin, Havana, Yara, Mexican, St. Domingo, Columbia (Columbian,
Giron, Esmelraldia, Palmyra, Ambolima), Rio Grande, Brazil, Orinoco,
Paraguay, Porto Rico, Arracan, Greek, Java, Sumatra, Japan, Hungarian,
China, Manilla, Algerian, Turkey, Holland (Amersfoort), Syrian
(Latakia), French (St. Omer), Russian, and Circassian. Many of these
varieties are well known to commerce, and others are hardly known
outside the limit of their cultivation.

All of these varieties may be divided into three classes,[68] viz.:
cigar, snuff, and cut-leaf tobacco. The first class, cigar leaf,
includes all those varieties of