The learned botanist, Meyen, speaking of China in relation to the habit of smoking, deals with another and more pertinent aspect of the question. ‘It has long been the opinion,’ he remarks, ‘that the use of tobacco, as well as its culture, was peculiar to the people of America; but this is now proved to be incorrect by our present more exact acquaintance with China and India. The consumption of tobacco in the Chinese Empire is of immense extent, and the practice seems to be of great antiquity, for on very old sculptures I have observed the very same tobacco-pipes which are still used. Besides, we know the plant which furnishes the Chinese tobacco; it is even said to grow wild in the East Indies. It is certain that this tobacco plant of eastern Asia is quite different from the American species.’ The tobacco grown in China is very light in colour and almost tasteless, possessing a very small amount of the essential oil, one or two per cent. as against seven or eight per cent. yielded by the Virginian plant. Experiment, however, has brought to light the fact that climate and soil are really answerable for all the difference between the two kinds; that the _Nicotiana tabacum_ of America for example, when transplanted into Syrian soil, has after a few years’ cultivation lost its marked characteristics and become a light-coloured, mild tobacco, like the Shiraz herb. Meyen’s argument would have had more value if he had been able to assign a date to the sculpture on which he had observed representations of tobacco-pipes, or if he himself had seen and examined specimens of the tobacco-plant said to grow wild in the East Indies. As his statement lacks the certainty which authenticated facts alone can give, it leaves the question still unanswered. The two Lazarists, MM. Gabet and Huc, whose zeal and heroic enterprise carried them safely through the wildest districts of Tartary and Thibet, make no mention of the practice of smoking among the inhabitants of those countries; though in China they had noticed outside tobacconists’ shops an effigy of the tobacco plant, which they took to be a representation of the royal insignia of France, for they speak of it as the _fleur-de-lis_. Doubtless China rose in their estimation when they beheld so flattering an acknowledgment of its indebtedness to the grand nation for the blessing the herb conferred on an unworthy people. But if such were their impression they greatly erred. The inhabitants of the Celestial Empire (Tin-shan) entertained notions of a very different character. Their country (Chung-tow) occupied the centre of the earth, and all beings outside their borders they regarded as Fan-qui, barbarian wanderers, or outlandish demons. The exalted ideas they had formed of themselves led them into the happy delusion that they were the lower empire of the celestial universe. ‘In the heavens,’ says M. Pingré, ‘they beheld a vast republic, an immense empire, composed of kingdoms and provinces;