Leaving the aerial domain of fairy-land, our thoughts are wafted to Central Asia, still in search of an Eastern birthplace for the weed. In the writings of a Hindoo physician, examined by Doctor Mayer of Konisberg in the course of his Eastern researches, it is stated that tobacco was first brought into India by the Franks in the year 1609, that is to say, nearly a century after its introduction into Europe. The date agrees well with the progress the Portuguese had at that time made in establishing themselves in India. For nearly a century they had been in possession of Goa; they held important seats of commerce in various other parts of India, and had command of the greater part of the oriental trade. These earliest of European explorers in the far East, having about the close of the fifteenth century made a successful passage round the Cape of Good Hope, were not slow to secure for themselves a footing on the western shores of Asia, and onward to the Indian Archipelago. Wherever they settled they introduced the American habit of smoking, and eagerly was it adopted by the different peoples with whom they had dealings. In the annals of Java, tobacco is stated to have been imported into that island, and the habit of smoking it taught to the natives by the Portuguese in 1601. To the Portuguese and the Spaniards, fortified later by the prodigious puffing powers of the Dutch, may be fairly ascribed whatever credit may be due for spreading a knowledge in the Eastern World of the habit which, for weal or for woe, has exercised a more potent witchery over man’s life than probably any other indulgence, largely modifying and usually soothing and sobering his temperament. It seems but reasonable to suppose that if the plant and its use as a narcotic had been known in the East generally, independently of Europe, the indefatigable Jesuits, who penetrated into almost every nook of the Old World likely to afford a see to Rome, would have made the discovery and noted the fact with their usual accuracy. The illustrious traveller and naturalist, Palias, however, takes a different view of the question. ‘Amongst the Chinese,’ he writes, ‘and amongst the Mongolian tribes who had the most intercourse with them, the custom of smoking is so general, so frequent, and has become so necessary a luxury, the form of the pipes, from which the Dutch seem to have taken theirs, so original; and lastly, the preparation of the dried leaves, which are merely rubbed to pieces and then put into the pipe, so peculiar that they could not possibly have derived all this from America by way of Europe, especially as India, where the practice of smoking is not so general, intervenes between Persia and China.’ But surely this reasoning is merely an example of drawing inference from insufficient data; from what at best bears the appearance only of probability.