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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: WORDS FOR TOBACCO IN AMERICAN INDIAN LANGUAGES1 By ROLAND B. DIXON OF all the features of aboriginal American culture, the use of tobacco has long been regarded as one of the most characteristic. The idea of questioning its native character and antiquity could, in virtue of the mass of evidence indicating its use in very early times, hardly occur to anyone at all familiar with the results of American archaeology during the last generation. Professor Wiener, however, in a recent volume2 has, in characteristically iconoclastic fashion, challenged this general conviction, and seeks to show, primarily on linguistic grounds, that not only are the words for tobacco over a large portion of the New World of West African Negro origin and ultimately derived from Arabic, but that the tobacco plant itself and the custom of smoking were unknown here until they were introduced, primarily by the Negro slaves brought over by the Portuguese and Spaniards, in the early part of the sixteenth century. Any question of the use of tobacco in America in pre-Columbian times is of course answered sufficiently and conclusively by the archaeological data and no amount of evidence that certain -words for tobacco were of African origin could avail to prove the foreign introduction of the plant, in the face of the occurrence let us say of pipes or cigarettes in basket-maker or cliff-dweller sites, or of pipes in strata of typical Toltec culture in the Valley of Mexico. While therefore,Professor Wiener's theory of the African origin of the plant itself and the custom of smoking, is manifestly quite indefensible, it is perhaps worth while to examine critically the evidence which he presents for the foreign origin of certain tobacco words. It will, I believe, be shown, that not only is there little or no fou...