Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 22.djvu/192

 180 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920

now used for tobacco by the Sudanese and Mande tribes, which names he attempts to derive from the Arabic "tubbaq" an aromatic plant whose leaves were used in Arabia for dressing wounds. Now tobacco being as he says (although without any satisfactory or valid evidence 1 ) native in Africa, "took the place of the plants which were exotics" (i.e., the original "tubbaq" of Arabia), and since "the magic Mussulman pharmacopoea " utilized "aromatic plants for burning" (i.e., incensing) "there arose in Africa the habit of smoking." As it will be found on examination that nearly every stage in this "argument" rests on unveri- fied assumptions, it is to say the least, hardly convincing. But this is the whole case for the African use of tobacco in smoking prior to the discovery of America!

The second stage in the argument, viz., that we have no early accounts of tobacco or the use of smoking in America is equally unconvincing. He points out what is indeed a puzzling fact, that Columbus in his first voyage makes but one very uncertain reference to smoking, and that in the earlier accounts of Florida its use is not mentioned. On the other hand he minimizes and quite misunderstands (as well as mistrans- lates!) the evidence afforded bySahagun and Bernal Diaz. He ridicules Oviedo's earlier errors in confusing the Antillean custom of inhaling cohoba (Piptadenia peregrina) with the smoking of tobacco, and denies in toto the former practice with its use of the bifurcated snuffing tube; a denial which, in view of Uhle's and Safford's careful studies, is without force. He also points out that the first description of smoking in Brazil dates only from 1555, and that Thevet then states that tobacco is called "petun." This affords an opportunity for one of the pieces of pure speculation in the philological field with which the volume abounds. For this word, widely diffused in the languages of the Tupi-Guarani stock, is, says Professor Wiener, derived from the Portuguese "betume" in turn derived from " bitumen." As the Arabic " tubbaq " was originally used to refer to the glutinous qualities of the leaves of the plant used in Arabia for dressing wounds, and later was transferred to tobacco which the Negroes learned to smoke, and since Arabic influence in medicine was not yet extinct in Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century, therefore "betume" since it also referred to a viscous substance "must" have acquired the same various meanings (i.e., tobacco) as "tubbaq,"

��1 Of the two references given to prove that tobacco is native in Africa, one does not even refer to the subject, while the other clearly indicates the exact oppo- site to what Prof. Wiener says. Similar examples of gross carelessness or direct misrepresentation abound.

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