Excursions in India
Subtitle: including a walk over the Himalaya Mountains, to the sources of the Jumna and the Ganges
By: by Captain Thomas Skinner, of the 31st Regiment
Publisher: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley
Published: 1832
Place of publication: London
Language: eng
Subjects: Tobacco use; British; Smoking in art; Description and travel
Notes: Vol. 1: xi, [1], 330 p., [1] leaf of plates; v. 2: vii, 312 p., [1] leaf of plates.

"Every class in India smokes tobacco ... The pipes are in as great variety too as the parties that are using them ... The Europeans are generally as much addicted to the custom as the natives ... It seems scarcely necessary when fifty people sit down to dinner in the month of July, that the heat should be augmented by the addition of nearly two hundred servants. When ... this crowd [is] no longer required ... the hookahs are introduced, that the hot air may be duly set in motion by the fumes of tobacco. The habit becomes at length so confirmed that the person indulging it canot give it over ..."--V. 1, p. 102-104. "The natives are remarkably fond of tobacco ... their pipes are to be found on every hill: they make two holes in the earth ... in one they stick a reed, and in the other the tobacco ..."--V. 1, p. 327-330.

Illustrations: 2 mounted prints : lithograph ; full-page (size of primary support 14 x 12 cm.). "Drawn on stone by T.M. Baynes; printed by C. Hullmandel." Frontispiece to each v., the first with legend "Mountaineers of the Himalaya halting to smoke."

Binding: Publisher's dark violet gray cloth with gilt leather label on spines.