Not everything, but everything that seemed of interest and importance in the history of tobacco, has been brought together in this volume. It is a curious history and a history of curiosities, not the least being the strange yet widely familiar fact that human beings smoke. Because it is so familiar, much that is dramatic and exciting and even ridiculous in the long record of smoking and some less practiced nicotian habits, has gone into the archives and been forgotten. Much of it should not be forgotten: the puzzled reporting of explorers, during their American travels in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, about the extraordinary uses of tobacco among the aborigines; the extravagant joy with which Europeans adopted smoking, with its effect upon manners.