Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 3:

Another tract which may be classed with Venner's "Treatise" was the "Nepenthes or the Vertues of tobacco," by Dr. William Barclay, which was published at Edinburgh in 1614. This is sometimes referred to and quoted, as by Fairholt, as if it were a whole-hearted defence of tobacco-taking. But Barclay enlarges mainly on the medicinal virtues of the herb. "If Tabacco," he says, "were used physically and with discretion there were no medicament in the worlde comparable to it"; and again: "In Tabacco there is nothing which is not medicine, the root, the stalke, the leaves, the seeds, the smoake, the ashes." The doctor gives sundry directions for administering tobacco—"to be used in infusion, in decoction, in substance, in smoke, in salt." But Barclay clearly does not sympathize with its indiscriminate use for pleasure. "As concerning the smoke," he says, "it may be taken more frequently, and for the said effects, but always fasting, and with emptie stomack, not as the English abusers do, which make a smoke-boxe of their skull, more fit to be carried under his arme that selleth at Paris dunoir a noircir to blacke mens shooes then to carie the braine of him that can not walke, can not ryde except the Tabacco Pype be in his mouth." He goes on to say that he was once in company with an English merchant in Normandy—"betweene Rowen and New-haven"—who was a merry fellow, but was constantly wanting a coal to kindle his tobacco. "The Frenchman wondered and I laughed at his intemperancie."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

A frequent sign-device among dealers in snuff was the Crown and Rasp. The oldest method of taking snuff, says Larwood, in the "History of Signboards," was "to scrape it with a rasp from the dry root of the tobacco plant; the powder was then placed on the back of the hand and so snuffed up; hence the name of râpé (rasped) for a kind of snuff, and the common tobacconist's sign of La Carotte d'or (the golden root) in France." Râpé became in English "rappee," familiar in snuff-taking days as the name for a coarse kind of snuff made from the darker and ranker tobacco leaves. The list of prices and names given by Wimble, a snuff-seller, about 1740, and printed in Fairholt's "History of tobacco," contains eighteen different kinds of rappee-English, best English, fine English, high-flavoured coarse, low, scented, composite, &c. The rasps for obtaining this râpé, continues Larwood, "were carried in the waistcoat pocket, and soon became articles of luxury, being carved in ivory and variously enriched. Some of them, in ivory and inlaid wood, may be seen at the Hotel Cluny in Paris, and an engraving of such an object occurs in 'Archæologia,' vol. xiii. One of the first snuff-boxes was the so-called râpé or grivoise box, at the back of which was a little space for a piece of the root, whilst a small iron rasp was contained in the middle. When a pinch was wanted, the root was drawn a few times over the iron rasp, and so the snuff was produced and could be offered to a friend with much more grace than under the above-mentioned process with the pocket-grater."

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