250 NAECOTIC USAGES AND SUPERSTITIONS 



chimney, richly carved with armorial bearings and the grotesque devices common 

 on works of the period. Among these are a mermaid playing the harp, a mon- 

 key blowing a horn, a cat playing a fiddle, and a fox smoking a tobacco pipe. 

 There can be no mistake as to the meaning of the last lively representation, and 

 on the same stone is the date 1510, the year in which the wing of the castle is 

 ascertained to bave been built,"* and in which it may be added, Jamaica was 

 settled by the Spaniards. 



Having thus even at the very first, — while " at a loss to determine 

 to what period the curious relics called Dane's or Elfin pipes belong- 

 ed," and consequently avoiding a dogmatic assertion on a subject 

 "left for further investigation," — furnished a tolerably significant 

 indication of my inclination to assign to such nicotian relics a post- 

 Columbian introduction to Britain ; and having, moreover, at a later 

 period given unequivocal expression of a confirmed opinion of 

 their modern origin: I was somewhat surprised to find myself, not 

 very long since, figuring alongside of a singularly creditable array of 

 chivalrous archaeologists, all knights of the ancient tobacco pipe, and 

 ready to shiver a lance with any puny modern heretic who ventured 

 to question that Julius Caesar smoked his merchaum at the passage 

 of the Rhine, or that Herodotus partook of a Scythian peace-pipe 

 when gathering the materials for the birth of History ! Here is the 

 array of learned authorities, clipped out of a recent English periodical, 

 produced as it will be seen, to answer in the affirmative, that the 

 ancients did smoke : Scythian and Roman, Celt, Frank, and Norman ! 



Did the Ancients Smoke ? — The question as to whether smoking was known 

 to the ancients has just been started in Germany by the publication of a drawing 

 contained in the Recueil des Antiquite's Suisses of Baron de Bonstetten, which re- 

 presents two objects in clay, which the author expressly declares to be smoking 

 pipes. The authors of the " History of the Canton of the Grisons" had already 

 spoken of these objects, but classified them among the instruments made use of by 

 the soothsayers. The Abbe Cochet, in his work on Subterranean Normandy, men- 

 tions having found similar articles either whole or in fragments, in the Roman 

 necropolis near Dieppe, which he at first considered as belonging to the seventeenth 

 century, or perhaps to the time of Henri III. and Henri IV, The Abbe, however, 

 afterwards changed his opinion on reading the work of Dr. Collingwood Bruce, 

 entitled " The Roman Wall," in which the author asks the question whether the 

 pipes discovered at. Pierce Bridge, in Northumberland, and in London, at places 

 where Roman stations were known to have existed, belonged to the Romans? Dr. 

 Wilson, in his Archaeology of Scotland, states that tobacco was only introduced as 

 a superior kind of narcotic, and that hemp was already known to the ancients as 

 a sedative. The pipes found in Scotland by Dr. Wilson might have served for 

 using this latter substance. M. Wcechter, in his " Celtic Monuments of Hanover," 

 says that clay pipes from 6 to 8 inches in length had been fouud in tombs at 



* Archeology and Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, p. 681. The Cawdor sculpture and date 

 are described on the authority of Mr. Caruthers, a very trustworthy observer. 



