234 NARCOTIC USAGES AKD SUPERSTITIONS 



are the scalp war-trophy, and the peace-pipe of the American Indian, 

 —the characteristics not of a tribe, or a nation, but of a whole 

 continent. Of the indigenous uniqueness of the former of these 

 there is no question. It may not be altogether unprofitable to re- 

 consider the purely American origin of the usages connected with 

 the latter, on which doubts have been repeatedly cast, and more 

 especially by recent writers, when considering the inquiry from very 

 diverse points of view. 



Among the native products of the American continent, there is 

 none which so strikingly distinguishes it as the tobacco plant, and the 

 purposes to which its leaf is applied; for even were it proved that 

 the use of it as a narcotic, and the practise of smoking its burning 

 leaf, had originated independently in the old world, the sacred 

 institution of the peace-pipe must still remain as the peculiar 

 characteristic of the Bed Indian of America. Professor John- 

 ston, in his " Chemistry of Common Life," remarks with reference 

 to this and others of the narcotics peculiar to the new world: — " The 

 Aborigines of Central America rolled up the tobacco leaf, and 

 dreamed away their lives in smoky reveries, ages before Columbus 

 •was born, or the colonists of Sir "Walter Raleigh brought it within the 

 precincts of the Elizabethean Court. The cocoa leaf, now the comfort 

 and strength of the Peruvian muletero, was chewed as he does it, in 

 far remote times, and among the same mountains, by the Indian 

 natives whose blood he inherits." The former of these narcotics, 

 however, it is scarcely necessary to say, was not confined, within any 

 period known to us, to central America, though its name of tobacco, 

 — derived by some from the Haitian tambaku, and by others from 

 Talaco, a province of Yucatan, where the Spaniards are affirmed to 

 have first met with it, — appears to have been the native term for the 

 pipe, and not for the plant, which was called kohiba. 



So far as we can now infer from the evidence furnished by 

 native arts and relics connected with the use of the tobacco plant, it 

 seems to have been as familiar to most of the ancient tribes of the 

 north west, and the Aborigines of our Canadian forests, as to those 

 of the American tropics, of which the Nicotiana Tabacum is believed 

 to be a native. Iso such remarkable depositories indeed have been 

 found to the north of the great chain of lakes, as those disclosed to 

 the explorers of the tumuli of " Mound City," in the Scioto valley, 

 Ohio, from a single one of which, nearly two hundred pipes were taken ; 

 most of them composed of a hard red porphyritic stone, with their 

 bowls elaborately carved in miniature figures of animals, birds, 



