Herodotus says that the Messagetæ, or Scythians, possessed a tree bearing a strange fruit which, when they met together, they cast into the fire and inhaled its fumes till they became intoxicated, in much the same way as the Greeks did with wine. What this strange produce was we learn in book IV., cap. 78, where he relates the story of the Scythians making themselves drunk with hemp-seed. They crept with it under their blankets, and, throwing it on red-hot stones, inhaled the fumes arising therefrom. Simple narrations such as these fall in quite naturally with one’s ideas of primitive man adapting himself to his circumstances. The Father of History never indulges in flights of fancy or creations of the imagination; it is enough for him to render a straightforward account of such things as came under his own eyes, or of events as they had been related to him. But when we come to a modern writer who tells a smoking-story of far-back times, relating, indeed, to none other than the ‘mighty hunter before the Lord,’ (enjoying, we may assume, a quiet pipe after a day’s hard riding across country), then doubt begins to take possession of the mind, and we are inclined to let that tale go for what it is worth. Lieutenant Walpole is responsible for the story that, when he was at Mosul, there came into his hands a very old Arabic manuscript, in the opening chapter of which the ancient scribe declared that Nimrod used tobacco. Application of the higher criticism to this relic of antiquity would be quite out of place; why, indeed, should men seek to be wise above what is written? But let us look a little farther into what Mr. Walpole has to narrate of the people among whom he sojourned, respecting their indulgence in the social pleasure of the pipe. From his highly interesting work on _The Ansayrii, or The Assassins_ (published in 1851) we gather that while at Mosul he was so impressed by the prevalence of the habit of smoking among all classes, that he made diligent inquiry of the learned of the land respecting its origin; for he felt convinced that nothing European, much less American, could possibly have crept into this remote district of the Old World, whose inhabitants were living as their fathers had lived for ages. ‘In the East,’ he writes, ‘it is rare to find a man or a woman who does not smoke. Enter a house, and a smoking-instrument is put into your hand as naturally as you are asked to sit down.’ Mr. Walpole had not long to wait before his new friends found means of satisfying his curiosity and of quickening the interest already awakened within him as to the antiquity of the habit. A venerable sage disclosed to his wondering eyes the manuscript aforesaid. It filled over a hundred closely-written pages, and was divided into eight chapters, in the first of which was related the story of Nimrod. The origin of the different opinions for and against tobacco are enlarged upon in its pages; this, by the way, seems to imply that