130. _Petum_. Tobacco, _Nicotiana rustica_, sometimes called wild tobacco. It was a smaller and more hardy species than the _Nicotiana tabacum_, now cultivated in warmer climates, but had the same qualities though inferior in strength and aroma. It was found in cultivation by the Indians all along our coast and in Canada. Cartier observed it growing in Canada in 1535. Of it he says: "There groweth also a certain kind of herbe, whereof in Sommer they make a great prouision for all the yeere, making great account of it, and onely men vse of it, and first they cause it to be dried in the Sunne, then weare it about their neckes wrapped in a little beasts skinne made like a little bagge, with a hollow peece of stone or wood like a pipe; then when they please they make pouder of it, and then put it in one of the ends of the said Cornet or pipe, and laying a cole of fire vpon it, at the other ende sucke so long, that they fill their bodies full of smoke, till that it commeth out of their mouth and nostrils, euen as out of the Tonnell of a chimney. They say that this doth keepe them warme and in health: they neuer goe without some of it about them. We ourselues haue tryed the same smoke, and hauing put it in our mouthes, it seemed almost as hot as Pepper."--_Jacques Cartier, 2 Voyage_, 1535; _Hakluyt_, London, ed. 1810, Vol. III. p. 276. We may here remark that the esculents found in cultivation at Saco, beans, squashes, pumpkins, and corn, as well as the tobacco, are all American tropical or subtropical plants, and must have been transmitted from tribe to tribe, from more southern climates. The Indian traditions would seem to indicate this. "They have a tradition," says Roger Williams, "that the Crow brought them at first an _Indian_ Graine of Corne in one Eare, and an _Indian_ or _French_ Beane in another, from the Great God _Kautantouwit's_ field in the Southwest from whence they hold came all their Corne and Beanes."-- _Key to the Language of America_, London, 1643, Narragansett Club ed., p. 144. Seventy years before Champlain, Jacques Cartier had found nearly the same vegetables cultivated by the Indians in the valley of the St. Lawrence. He says: "They digge their grounds with certaine peeces of wood, as bigge as halfe a sword, on which ground groweth their corne, which they call Ossici; it is as bigge as our small peason.... They haue also great store of Muske-milions. Pompions, Gourds, Cucumbers, Peason, and Beanes of euery colour, yet differing from ours."--_Hakluyt_, Vol. II. p. 276. For a full history of these plants, the reader is referred to the History of Plants, a learned and elaborate work now in press, by Charles Pickering, M.D. of Boston.