Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XIV

"Much has been written on a revolution so unique in its origin, unsurpassed in incidents and results, and constituting one of the most singular episodes in human history; but next to nothing is recorded of whence the various processes of manufacture and uses were derived. Some imagine the popular pabulum[56] for the nose of translantic origin. No such thing! Columbus first beheld smokers in the Antilles. Pizarro found chewers in Peru, but it was in the country discovered by Cabral that the great sternutatory was originally found. Brazilian Indians were the Fathers of snuff, and its best fabricators. Though counted among the least refined of aborigines, their taste in this matter was as pure as that of the fashionable world of the East. Their snuff has never been surpassed, nor their apparatus for making it."