Jack Dolan, age 7, of Des Moines, Iowa, for his question:

Who invented. tobacco smoking?

America was the original home of the tobacco plant—and .this is where people first started smoking its dried leaves. Experts think that the American Indians  were smoking tobacco almost two thousand years ago. Nobody knows what started it. For a long time, it was smoked in a sacred peace pipe, which was handed from person to person. However, long before Columbus arrived, many people here had the tobacco habit. They smoked the dried leaves, and also ground them to powder to sniff. More than 400 years ago, the Spaniards. took samples of tobacco back to Europe. ‘The. people there learned to smoke it in pipes and also in cigars. In the 1600 the settlers of Virginia took to growing tobacco to sell around the world. We know more or less how the smoking habit grew, but we do not know the person who first started it.