Though Columbus and his immediate followers doubtless brought home specimens of tobacco among the other spoils of the New World, Jean Nicot, ambassador to Portugal from Francis II., first sent the seeds to France, where they were cultivated and used about the year 1560.  In honor of its sponsor, Botany has named the plant Nicotiana tabacum, and Chemistry distinguished as Nicotin its active alkaloid.  Sir Francis Drake first brought tobacco to England about 1586.  It owed the greater part of its early popularity, however, to the praise and practice of Raleigh:  his high standing and character would have sufficed to introduce still more novel customs.  The weed once inhaled, the habit once acquired, its seductions would not allow it to be easily laid aside; and we accordingly find that royal satire, public odium, and ruinous cost were alike inadequate to restrain its rapidly increasing consumption.  Somewhere about the year 1600 or 1601 tobacco was carried to the East, and introduced among the Turks and Persians,—­it is not known by whom:  the devotion of modern Mussulmans might reasonably ascribe it to Allah himself.  It seems almost incredible that the Oriental type of life and character could have existed without tobacco.  The pipe seems as inseparable as the Koran from the follower of Mahomet.

Barely three centuries ago, then, the first seeds of the Nicotiana tabacum germinated in European soil:  now, who shall count the harvests?  Less than three centuries ago, Raleigh attracted a crowd by sitting smoking at his door:  now, the humblest bog-trotter of Ireland must be poor indeed who cannot own or borrow a pipe.  A little more than a century and a half ago, the import into Great Britain was only one hundred and twenty thousand pounds, and part of that was reexported:  now, the imports reach thirty million pounds, and furnish to government a revenue of twenty millions of dollars,—­being an annual tax of three shillings four pence on every soul in the United Kingdom.  Nor is the case of England an exceptional one.  The tobacco-zone girdles the globe.  From the equator, through fifty degrees of latitude, it grows and is consumed on every continent.  On every sea it is carried and used by the mariners of every nation.  Its incense rises in every clime, as from one vast altar dedicated to its worship,—­before which ancient holocausts, the smoke of burnt-offerings in the old Jewish rites, the censers of the Church, and the joss-sticks of the East, must “pale their ineffectual fires.”  All classes, all ages, in all climates, and in some countries both sexes, use tobacco to dispel heat, to resist cold, to soothe to reverie, or to arouse the brain, according to their national habitations, peculiarities, or habits.

This is not the language of hyperbole.  With a partial exception in favor of the hop, tobacco is the sole recognized narcotic of civilization.  Opium and hemp, if indulged in, are concealed, by the Western nations:  public opinion, public morality, are at war with them.  Not so with tobacco, which the majority of civilized men use, and the minority rather deprecate than denounce.  We shall avail ourselves of some statistics and computations, which we find ready-calculated, at various sources, to support these assertions.  The following are the amounts of tobacco consumed per head in various countries:—­