ON TREE-TRUNK WATER-PIPES. 6l 



untrimmed, having their bark on, and each about 8ft. in length. 

 In the centre of each log a circular channel had been bored, and 

 one end of each length was pointed so that it might fit into the 

 next without any escape of water at the junction. Mr. Wil- 

 loughby induced the foreman in charge to cut off the pointed end 

 of one of these pipes, and was also good enough to present the 

 portion removed to me. 



To us of the Victorian, or iron age, water-pipes of this kind 

 naturally suggest a primitive time, such as that in which dug-out 

 canoes abounded in the British Isles. But for knowing that these 

 pipes were in use here when George III. was King, one might 

 be surprised to learn that among the remains of a Roman villa at 

 Fescote, Bucks., there was discovered, in 1840-3, a tank, contain- 

 ing a spring, " which ran through wooden trunks of trees to a 

 larger tank." ^^- Or that evidence of their existence in the Roman 



FIG. I. — SHAPE OF WOODEN WATER-PIPE. 



Wigmore Street, 1901. Length about 8 feet. 



(From a Sketch by Mi. Willotighby). 



CityatSilchester was discovered during the excavations in 1896.^"^^ 

 We learn also from Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, the recorder of 

 the excavations at Silchester, that " There does not seem to be 

 any record of such a discovery as this elsewhere in this country, 

 but one of precisely the same kind was made in France in 1772, 

 on the site of a Roman town at Chatelet, between St. Dizier and 

 Joinville in Champagne." This rarity is probably due mainly 

 to the comparative rapidity with which wooden pipes would tend 

 to perish, if close to the surface ; while, if deeper, they would be 

 proportionately the more likely to escape the notice of the 

 explorer. 



However, the interest attached to the discovery of primitive 

 water-pipes increases with the lateness, not the antiquity, of the 

 period to which they can be ascribed. Passing therefore over a 

 considerable interval of time, I learn from the Histovy of London 



(i) Gent. Mag. Library, Romano-Bvitish Remains. Part I., p. S. 

 (2) Archceologia. Second Series, Vol. V., pp. 432-3. (1897). 



