WHEN THE SPANISH first arrived in Central and South America following Columbus' initial voyages, they found that every newly discovered area whose inhabitants used tobacco had its own name for the plant. Not all the aborigines used tobacco, by any means. The Chilean Indians, for example, did not smoke until the Spanish introduced the custom to them; neither did the Incas of Peru. Bolivian Indians smoke very little to the present day, preferring to chew the coca leaf, which is also probably their most widely-used medicine, even to being an alleged aphrodisiac.1 But generally, the Indians around the Caribbean basin, the Gulf of Mexico, and down the eastern coast smoked heavily, using all five forms of tobacco consumption-pipes, snuff, chewing, cigars, and corn-husk cigarettes-and they also had considerably different names for the plant. Some of the Mexican Indians called it picietl or yetl. Brazilian coastal Indians called it petun or petum or patoun; and among the Portuguese the expression "making a petun" arose, meaning "making a cigar." Curiously, the word later developed into petunia, a name for a well-known plant within the same botanical family, which suggests that the Indians smoked petunias as well. The Haitians, on the other hand, called tobacco kohaba or cohoba (which possibly has an etymological connection with tobacco), although there is some disagreement about what kohaba really meant: Compton Mackenzie thinks it meant snuffing, not tobacco.2 Later reports showed a similar confusion in North America: the Virginian natives called tobacco uppowoc, while those in Massachusetts referred to it as pooke.3 Even in comparatively modern times the different North American Indian tribes have had dissimilar names for tobacco. As recently as I890 James Mooney reported that the Cherokees called tobacco Tsala. He added that they made this a kind of generic name for a number of plants having similar manners of seeding, but that these plants all shared the name Tsaliyusti ("like tobacco" ) . One of these was the common mullein, which various informants called the blue, yellow, downy, and large Tsaliyust.4 Another North American name for tobacco was o-yen'-kwa, which the Onondagas used generally for tobacco as late as I902, adding the name hon'we, "real" or "original," to distinguish their own kind, Nicotiana rustica. The distinction is an interesting one. Although there are about sixty species of tobacco, the Indians