count we have of it is given by Roman Pane,
the friar who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage of discovery
(1494), and who alludes to its use among the Indians by means of a
cane half a cubit long. Ewbank says:

"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."

[Footnote 56: Dr. John Hill in his tract "Cautions
against the immoderate use of snuff" gives the following
definition of it. "The dried leaves of tobacco, rasped,
beaten, or otherwise reduced to powder, make what we
call snuff." This tract was published in 1761. The
author, afterwards Sir John Hill, was equally celebrated
as a physician and a writer of farces, as denoted by the
following epigram by Garrick:

"For physic and farces his equal there scarce is;
His farces are physic, his physic a farce is."]

Soon after the introduction and cultivation of tobacco in Spain and
Portugal its use in the form of snuff came in vogue and from these
notions it spread rapidly over Europe, particularly in France and
Italy. It is said to have been used first in France[57] by the wife
of Henry II., Catherine de Medici, and that it was first used at court
during the latter part of the Sixteenth Century. The Queen seemed to
give it a good standing in society and it soon became the fashion to
use the powder by placing a little on the back of the hand and
inhaling it. The use of snuff greatly increased from the fact of its
supposed medicinal properties and its curative powers in all diseases,
parti