As the tobacco plant is an annual which gives a great quantity of seeds, it was easy to sow and to cultivate or naturalize them more or less in the neighbourhood of dwellings, but it must be noted that different species of the genus Nicotiana were employed in different parts of America, which shows that they had not all the same origin. _Nicotiana Tabacum_, commonly cultivated, was the most widely diffused, and sometimes the only one in use in South America and the West Indies. The use of tobacco was introduced into La Plata, Paraguay,[674] and Uruguay by the Spaniards, consequently we must look further to the north for the origin of the plant. De Martius does not think it was indigenous in Brazil,[675] and he adds that the ancient Brazilians smoked the leaves of a species belonging to their country known to botanists as _Nicotiana Langsdorfii_. When I went into the question in 1855,[676] I had not been able to discover any wild specimens of _Nicotiana Tabacum_ except those sent by Blanchet from the province of Bahia, numbered 3223, _a_. No author, either before or since that time, has been more fortunate, and I see that Messrs. Flückiger and Hanbury, in their excellent work on vegetable drugs,[677] say positively, “The common tobacco is a native of the new world, though not now known in a wild state.” I venture to gainsay this assertion, although the wild nature of a plant may always be disputed in the case of a plant which spreads so easily from cultivation. We find in herbaria a number of specimens gathered in Peru without indication that they were cultivated or that they grew near plantations. Boissier’s herbarium contains two specimens collected by Pavon, from different localities.[678] Pavon says in his flora that the species grows in the moist warm forests of the Peruvian Andes, and that it is cultivated. But—and this is more significant—Edouard André gathered specimens in the republic of Ecquador at Saint Nicholas, on the western slope of the volcano of Corazon in a virgin forest. These he was kind enough to send me. They are evidently the tall variety (four to six feet) of _N. Tabacum_, with the upper leaves narrow and acuminate, as they are represented in the plates of Hayne and Miller.[679] The lower leaves are wanting. The flower, which gives the true characters of the species, is certainly that of _N. Tabacum_, and it is well known that the height of this plant and the breadth of the leaves vary in cultivation.[680] It is very possible that its original country extended north as far as Mexico, as far south as Bolivia, and eastward to Venezuela.