Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/191

 BOOK REVIEWS 179

misstatements. Etymology is a fascinating but precarious pastime, and if we select one of a series of variants, assume a certain amount of misspelling or misreading together with phonetic equivalences for which there is no proof, we may achieve almost anything!

In one at least of his attempts to prove the "atrocious forgery" of much of Columbus' writings and those of Ramon Pane, Professor Wiener shows a readiness to seek for and accept far-fetched explanations, a tendency which becomes more noticeable in his later chapters. Thus he rejects as a lie the story told by Columbus of fishing by the aid of the remora or sucking-fish, and declares it to have been derived from Odoric of Pordenone's account of cormorant fishing in eastern China. A little investigation would have shown that improbable as it may seem, there is no good reason to brand it as a pure invention or plagiarism, for pre- cisely this same method has" been and still is employed in Melanesia and its practicability has recently been demonstrated by tests in New York!

In his third chapter, the author deals at length with the question of tobacco and the custom of smoking, attempting to prove that tobacco was unknown in the New World until the plant and its name and use were introduced primarily by the Negroes, who were brought over as slaves during the first half of the sixteenth century. There are few things which have been regarded as more typically American than tobacco and its use, and one must admire the courage of the author in declaring this generally accepted belief to be wholly wrong. But a careful reading of the chapter in question leads only to amazement that anyone could, without the slightest regard for the facts of American archaeology and ethnology (with whose results in the last generation Professor Wiener appears to be wholly unacquainted) put forward so revolutionary a theory. The main steps in the argument seem to be (i) that tobacco and the practice of smoking were known to the West African Negroes prior to the end of the fifteenth century; (2) that the earlier explorers of the New World nowhere found tobacco in use, (3) that the words for tobacco, pipe, etc., in American Indian languages are in the main derived from the Mande words for the same, which go back ultimately to Arabic originals, and (4) that since all pipes must thus in the New World be post-Columbian, all archaeological remains with which they are asso- ciated are also post-Columbian.

As the earliest certain record the author has been able to discover referring to the use of tobacco in Africa is at the end of the sixteenth century, it is obviously incumbent on him, if he is to prove his theory, to find indirect evidence of its earlier presence. He does so in the names

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