Africa and the Discovery of America Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1922 edition. Excerpt: ... absence of any reference to tobacco in Africa before the XVII. century is a convincing proof that it was imported there from America. To this it must be remarked that smoking is but once mentioned in the Belles Lettres of Europe, namely in Febrer, that pipes are not mentioned at all, and that if it were not for the overwhelming proof from medical works that smoking and pipes have been in use for at least 1700 years, and for the corroborative evidence of the finds of pipes in ancient tombs, one would jump to the conclusion that smoking and pipes never existed. Smoking none the less was so common as a medical practice that it did not attract any attention, anymore than hundreds of medical phenomena which existed but did not find their way into literature. Only when the vice of smoking as a pleasure became common in Europe, and that was only at the end of the XVI. century, did people begin to observe more closely the same phenomenon in Africa, while in America, where the vice spread immediately after the discovery, this observation was being made from the start. 1 Ibid. 'See vol. I, p. 111. There is no evidence that the tobacco plant was known in Europe before its importation by Thevet in 1556.1 A few years later the Nicotiana rustica was described by Dodoens as Hyoscamus luteus and as some kind of henbane by Matthiolus and others. In 1586 it was given as Ital. Iusquiamo nuovo, Iusquiamo maggiore, German Wundt Bilsam, gelb Wundkraut? Gerarde, in his Herbal, in 1597, named it "yellow henbane" or "English tobacco,"3 and thus it was named by J. Parkinson.4 In the second half of the XV. century an Arabic source refers to smoking in Africa: "At Kubacca the tobacco serves also as money. By a singular homophony with the...