i8o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



pipe was regarded in America is furnished by the mound pipes, 

 upon which the native sculptors expended a much greater amount 

 of patient and careful labor than they devoted to any other im- 

 plement. So skillfully executed are they that Dr. Rau does not 

 hesitate to affirm that modern artists would find no small diffi- 

 culty in reproducing them, even with the great advantage of 

 metallic tools. These facts seem to have impressed themselves 

 strongly upon the mind of the late Sir Daniel Wilson, who many 

 years ago investigated thoroughly the narcotic arts and super- 

 stitions of the Americans, and to whom the writer is indebted for 

 the main idea of the present paper. The mound pipes are, indeed, 

 a suggestive theme, though the conclusions which archaeologists 

 have drawn from them are by no means unanimous. A remark- 

 able depository of carved pipes was unearthed by Squier and 

 Davis in one of the mounds of the group known as Mound City, 

 in Ohio. From a single hearth they took nearly two hundred 

 finely sculptured pipes, many of them, however, being broken and 

 injured by the action of fire. Recalling the sacred associations 

 connected in the mind of the Indian with the tobacco plant and 

 the instrument of its use, theorists have found in this mound a 

 possible altar devoted exclusively to nicotian rites. Without dis- 

 cussing the motives which may have led the builders of the 

 mounds to deposit so many of these pipes in one place, we may 

 assume with some confidence that the carved pipes were most 

 probably totems. "Their sacred nature," remarks Henshaw, 

 " would enable us to understand how naturally pipes would be 

 selected as the medium for totemic representations." 



Leaving for a time the regions where the pipe occupies so 

 prominent a place in religious rites, we find, on approaching the 

 Rio Grande, that the use of tobacco becomes of far less frequent 

 occurrence. In the pueblos of the Southwest very few pipes have 

 been found. The Indians of this region have, however, a sacred 

 cigarette, the antiquity of which is indicated by repeated allusions 

 to it in the pueblo folk lore. The Navajos share with the Moquis 

 the smoke-prayer, in which the sacred smoke of the cigarette is 

 blown east, north, west, and south, to propitiate the good spirits 

 and drive away the evil ones. Gushing observed that the older 

 men of Zuni, in smoking cigarettes, would blow the smoke in dif- 

 ferent directions, closing their eyes, and muttering a few words 

 which he regarded as invocations. In Mexico and Central Amer- 

 ica the pipe reappears, though here it is evidently of much less 

 importance than in the North. One prominent example of its 

 application to religious uses is furnished by Diego de Landa. In 

 his Relacion de Cosas de Yucatan, describing the curious native 

 ceremony of baptism he says : " Tras esto (the priest) ivan los 

 dernas ayudantes del sacerdote con un manojo de flores y un 



