AMBER MOUTH-PIECES. 159 
taken out of the ground, the roots and branches removed, 
and the stem bored through after being seasoned for some 
time. The care shown in rearing insures a perfect straight- 
ness of stem, and an equable diameter of about an inch or 
an inch and a half. The last specimens, when cut from the 
tree, are as much as eight feet in length, dark purple-brown in 
color, and highly fragrant. At Pesth are made pipes about 
eighteen inches in length, of the shoots of the mock orange, 
remarkable for their quality in absorbing the oil of tobacco, 
they are flexible without being weak. The French make 
elegant pipe-bowls of the root of the tree-heath, but their 
chief attention is directed, as far as concerns wood pipes, to 
those of brier-root, which are made by them in large quanti- 
ties. The bowl and the short stems are carried out of one 
piece, and the wood is credited with absorbing some of the 
rank oil of tobacco. 
Amber—the only kind of resin that rises to the dignity of 
a gem—is unfitted for the bowl of a tobacco-pipe, because it 
cannot well bear the heat; but it is largely used for mouth- 
Pieces; especially by wealthy Oriental smokers. The Turks 
have a belief that amber wards off infection; an opinion 
which, whether right or wrong, tells well for the amber 
workers. There has always been a mystery connected with 
this remarkable substance. So far back as the Phenicians, 
amber was picked up on the Baltic shore of what is now 
called Prussia; and the same region has ever since been the 
chief aeerechouse for it. Tacitus was not far wrong when he 
conjectured that amber is a gum or resin exuded from certain 
trees, although other authorities have preferred a theory that 
‘it is a kind of wax or fat which has undergone slow petrifac- 
tion. At any rate, it must at one time have been liquid or 
semi-liquid ; for insects, flies, detached wings and legs, and 
small fragments of various kinds, are often found imbedded 
in it—those odds and ends of which Pope said :— 
‘st The things, we know, are neither rich nor rare; 
The wonder’s how the devil they got there!” 
