The best is grown in the district of Pe-Heen: the next quality is the product of Kin-lang Heen; and an inferior kind is grown in the plantations of She-fang Heen. [Illustration: A CHINESE PIPE.] Europeans who have visited this tobacco-producing district speak of a practice common among the inhabitants of rolling up tobacco for smoking in a separate leaf into cylindrical form, of the size of a large cigar. This simple circumstance is suggestive; it recalls to the memory what the first European adventurers in the New World have told us of the way the natives made up their herb for smoking. The Spaniards had observed the natives of Cuba and of Central America doing precisely the same thing; rolling up tobacco in a leaf of maize, or of the tobacco-plant, for smoking in the same way as do these denizens of the Flowery Land. And our countryman, Thomas Harriot, the historian of Raleigh’s first colonists, in his _Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia_, says: ‘Soon after we made our peace with the natives we found them making a fume of a dried leaf, which they rolled up in a leaf of maize, of the bigness of a man’s finger … putting a light to the leaf as they smoked it, as is done by all men in these days.’ This identity of practice and habit points to a new link in the chain of evidence, connecting the inhabitants of the New World with the nations of eastern Asia, more particularly with China. [Illustration: INDIAN PIPE-HEADS FOUND IN MOUND CITY, OHIO.] Bearing on the ethnological aspect of the subject is the fact that pipes have been found on many different occasions in the ancient earth-mounds of Ohio, in the valley of the Mississippi, and in Mexico, some of which are carved in the form of human heads of an unmistakably Mongolian type. Soon after the discovery of America the question of the origin of its inhabitants became a fertile source of conjecture among speculative thinkers. Probably Gregorio Garcia, a missionary who had for twenty years lived in South America, was the first to reject the general opinion that they were a new race of beings sprung from the soil they inhabited, and to suggest for them an Asiatic source. He published his views on the question in a work entitled _The Origin of the Indians of the New World_ (Valencia, 1607), wherein he expresses himself as opposed to the autochthonous character of the inhabitants, and points out reasons for thinking that the country had been peopled by Tartars and Chinese. Brerewood also, in his _Diversities of Languages and Religions_ (1632-5), assigned the American people an Eastern, and chiefly Tartar, origin. But Hugh Grotius argued that North America was peopled from a Scandinavian stock, though probably the Peruvians were from China. Coming to more recent times may be mentioned Professor Smith Barton of Pennsylvania, who, in his _New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America_, contends that they are descended from