ITS VALUE. 161 
fictitious, into pipe mouth-pieces, they are split on a leaden 
plate in a turning lathe, smoothed into shape by whet-stones, 
rubbed with chalk and water, and polished with a piece of 
flannel. It is an especially difficult kind of work; for unless 
the amber is allowed frequent intervals for cooling, it 
becomes electrically excited by the friction and shivers into 
fragments; the men, too, are put into nervous tremors if 
kept too long at work at one time. Amber is one of the 
most electrically excitable of all known substances; in fact, 
the name electricity itself was derived from electron, the 
Greek name for amber: Hookahs, chibouques, narghiles, 
meerschaums, all are largely adorned with amber mouth- 
pieces. The mouth-piece often consists of two or three 
pieces of amber, interjoined with ornaments of gold and 
gems; it is in such case the most costly part of the pipe. 
At one of the greater industrial exhibitions four Turkish 
amames, or amber mouth-pieces, were shown, illustrating 
clearly enough the value attached to choice specimens; two 
of them were worth £350 each, two £200 each, diamond 
studded. The Turkish and Persian pipes have often a small 
wooden tube inside the amber mouth-piece. They require 
frequent cleaning with a long wire and a bit of tow, and in 
some large towns there are professional pipe-cleaners. 
The natives of British Guiana have a curious kind of pipe, 
made of the rind of the fruit of the areca-palm, coiled up 
into a kind of cheroot, with an internal hollow to hold the 
tobacco. The poorer Hindoos make a simple pipe of two 
pieces of bamboo,—one cut close to a knot for the bowl, and 
amore slender piece for the tube. A lower class of natives 
in India make two holes of unequal length, with a piece of 
stick, in a clay soil; the holes are unequally inclined so as to 
meet at the bottom; the tobacco is placed in the shorter 
hole, and the smoker, applying his mouth to the longer, 
inhales the fumes in this primitive fashion. The pipes used 
for opium-smoking in various parts of the East have small 
bowls; the drug is too costly to be used otherwise than in 
small portions at a time, and too powerful to need more than 
11 
