_Nicotiana rustica_, Linnæus, a species with yellow flowers, very different from _Tabacum_,[681] and which yields a coarse kind of tobacco, was more often cultivated by the Mexicans and the native tribes north of Mexico. I have a specimen brought from California by Douglas in 1837, a time when colonists were still few; but American authorities do not admit that the plant is wild, and Dr. Asa Gray says that it sows itself in waste places.[682] This was perhaps the case with the specimens in Boissier’s herbarium, gathered in Peru by Pavon, and which he does not mention in the Peruvian flora. The species grows in abundance about Cordova in the Argentine Republic,[683] but from what epoch is unknown. From the ancient use of the plant and the home of the most analogous species, the probabilities are in favour of a Mexican, Texan, or Californian origin. Several botanists, even Americans, have believed that the species came from the old world. This is certainly a mistake, although the plant has spread here and there even into our forests, and sometimes in abundance,[684] having escaped from cultivation. Authors of the sixteenth century spoke of it as a foreign plant introduced into gardens and sometimes spreading from them.[685] It occurs in some herbaria under the names of _N. tartarica_, _turcica_, or _sibirica_; but these are garden-grown specimens, and no botanist has found the species in Asia, or on the borders of Asia, with any appearance of wildness. This leads me to refute a widespread and more persistent error, in spite of what I proved in 1855, namely, that of regarding some species ill described from cultivated specimens as natives of the old world, of Asia in particular. The proofs of an American origin are so numerous and consistent that, without entering much into detail, I may sum them up as follows:— _A._ Out of fifty species of the genus Nicotiana found in a wild state, two only are foreign to America; namely, _N. suavolens_ of New Holland, with which is joined _N. rotundifolia_ of the same country, and that which Ventinat had wrongly styled _N. undulata_; and _N. fragans_, Hooker, of the Isle of Pines, near New Caledonia, which differs very little from the preceding.