194 ST NICOTINE 



and lower the other — with advantage to both the consumer 

 and the revenue. 



Our gossip about the Indian weed may now be brought 

 to a close with a few words about its co-partner, the pipe. 

 For even tobacco-pipes, like all other products of men's 

 ingenuity, awaken interest all the more engrossing when 

 little else remains to tell the story of those who made them 

 and used them. They carry the imagination back to those 

 shadowy palaces of the Incas and Aztecs, where equally 

 shadowy potentates smoked out of pipes made of precious 

 metals, or of highly polished and richly-gilt wood. Pipes 

 indeed, present features highly interesting to a much larger 

 class than to professed ethnologists. The wide region 

 over which they are found, buried in mounds and tumuli 

 extending from the north-west coast of America to the 

 plains of Patagonia, tell us how universal was the habit of 

 smoking on that vast continent ; while similarity of 

 structure suggests a common origin. Curious specimens 

 have been found in the States of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, 

 Iowa, and in the great Mississippi valley, varying from the 

 simplest forms made out of baked clay with a plain 

 cylinder or urn, to others of a class, very uniform in type, 

 cut out of porphyry in a single piece. These latter have 

 a slightly convex base measuring about four inches in 

 length, and one inch broad, with the bowl on the centre. 

 A fine hole pierces the pipe from end to end of the base to 

 the bottom of the bowl, the opposite end being obviously 

 designed for the smoker to hold in the hand. Others are 

 remarkable for a fine display of artistic skill in the carving 

 of birds, mammals, reptiles and human heads, often fanciful 

 and grotesque, but always vigorously expressed. In 

 Mexico elaborately moulded and ornamented pipes have 

 been found, along with others of a type almost identical 



