One of the most curious questions in regard to the history of tobacco is that as to whether its use originated independently in Asia or was introduced there by Europeans. It is largely cultivated and used for smoking throughout the East from Turkey to China--including Persia and India on the way--and special varieties of tobacco, the Turkish, the Persian, and the Manilla are well known, and only produced in the East, whilst special forms of pipe, such as the “hukah” or “hooka,” the “hubble-bubble,” and the small Chinese pipe are distinctively Oriental. Not only that, but the islanders of the Far East are inveterate smokers of tobacco, and some of them have peculiar methods of obtaining the smoke, as, for instance, certain North Australians who employ “a smoke-box” made of a joint of bamboo. Smoke is blown into this receptacle by a faithful spouse, who closes its opening with her hand and presents the boxful of smoke to her husband. He inhales the smoke and hands the bamboo joint back to his wife for refilling. The Asiatic peoples are great lovers of tobacco, and it is certain that in Java they had tobacco as early as 1601, and in India in 1605. The hookah (a pipe, with water-jar attached, through which the smoke is drawn in bubbles) was seen and described by a European traveller in 1614. Should we not, therefore, suppose that in Asia they had tobacco and practised smoking before it was introduced from America into the West of Europe? It seems unlikely that Western nations should have given this luxury to the East when practically everything else of the kind has come from the East to Europe--the grape and wine made from it, the orange, lemon, peach, fig, spices of all kinds, pepper and incense. Yet it is certain that the Orientals got the habit of smoking tobacco from us, and not we from them.