Word: tabacum
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Jamestown also was the first place to find a cash cow and an economic system for exploiting it. The Powhatan smoked a crude indigenous species of tobacco. But in 1612, John Rolfe imported seeds of Nicotiana tabacum, the Spanish-American weed that was already a craze in England. By 1620 the colony had shipped almost 50,000 lbs. home. Fifty years later, Virginia and Maryland would ship 15 million lbs. Tobacco and foodstuffs were grown on privately owned farms. Beginning in 1618, old settlers were offered 100 acres of land, and newcomers who paid their way were given 50 acres...
...delicate, wide-leafed tobacco plant (Nicotiana tabacum) became known as "the divine herb" and "the princess of plants." But the foes of tobacco spied the devil's hoofs beneath the princess' skirt. King James I of Great Britain called tobacco "the lively image and pattern of hell," slapped on a big import tax. Louis XIII of France and Czar Michael I decreed penalties for smoking, ranging from death to castration, and Pope Urban VIII threatened excommunication for anyone found smoking in church or on church premises. A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Benjamin Rush, attacked tobacco on grounds...
Peruvians would often snicker and guffaw as they watched Goodspeed scramble after odd plants. They thought he was gathering aphrodisiacs. But what really interested the botanist was the fact that many of the earth's 60 species of Nicotiana grow among the Andes. There, scientists believe, the Nicotiana tabacum now commonly smoked developed long ago through natural hybridization. Federal tobaccomen think that wild, tough plants from their native mountains can perhaps be crossed with the highly bred, less vigorous tobacco strains now cultivated in the U.S., to increase their resistance to fungi, bacteria, viruses, insects which yearly cost growers...
| 1 |