OF THE OLD AND NEW WORLD. 235 



reptiles, &c, executed with great skill and fidelity to nature.* But 

 though not found in such numbers, sufficient examples of this class 

 of relics occur within the Canadian frontier to show the contempora- 

 neous practice of the same arts and customs in this northern region, 

 or to prove such an intercourse with the pipe-sculptors of more 

 southern latitudes, as is assumed in the case of the " Mound Build- 

 ers," by writers to whom any remote and undefined source ever 

 seems more probable than the one under consideration. Among 

 various examples of such Canadian relics in my own possession are 

 two stone pipe-heads found on the shores of Lake Simcoe. One of 

 these, formed ot a dark steatite, though imperfect, exhibits in its 

 carving— a lizard climbing up the bowl of the pipe, with the 

 underside of its lower-jaw ingeniously cut into a human counten- 

 ance peering over the pipe bowl at the face of the smoker — the same 

 curious imitative art of the native sculptor, as those engraved by 

 Messrs. Squire and Davis, from the ancient mounds of the 

 Mississippi valley. The other is decorated with a human head, mark- 

 ed by broad cheek-bones, and large ears, and wearing a flat and 

 slightly projecting head-dress. The material in which the latter is 

 carved is worthy of notice, as suggestive of its pertaining to the 

 locality where it was found. It is a highly silicious limestone, such 

 as abounds on the shores of the neighbouring Lake Couchiching, and 

 which from its great hardness was little likely to be chosen by the 

 pipe sculptor as the material on which to exercise his artistic skill, 

 unless in such a locality as this, where his choice lay between the 

 hard, but close grained limestone, and the still more intractable 

 crystalline rocks of the same region. Canadian examples of pipe- 

 sculpture, in a great variety of forms, executed in the favorite and 

 easily wrought red pipe-stone of the Coteau des Prairies, also occur ; 

 but these are generally supposed to belong to a more recent period, 

 and differ essentially in their style of art from the pipes of the mound 

 builders, worked in granite, porphyry, and limestone, as well as in the 

 steatites, and other varieties of the more easily wrought stones 

 which admi 1 :, like the red pipe stone, of the elaborate carving and 

 high degree of finish most frequently aimed at by them. In addition 

 to those, another class of pipes, of ruder workmanship in clay, and 

 ornamented for the most part, only with incised chevron and other 

 conventional patterns, exhibiting uo traces of imitative art, are of 

 frequent occurrence within the Canadian frontiers ; and to these I 

 propose to refer more minutely before closing this paper, as objects 



* Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge. Vol. I- p. 152, 



