258 NARCOTIC USAGES AND SUPERSTITIONS 



abundance on various sites in England and Ireland, where the sol- 

 diers of the parliament and revolution encamped ; and in Scotland 

 in divers localities from the border, northward, even to the Orkneys. 

 They have been repeatedly met with in old Churchyards, and turned 

 up in places of public resort. Occasionally too, to the bewilderment 

 of the antiquary, they are discovered in strange propinquity to primi- 

 tive, Roman, and medieval relics,— but in a sufficient number of cases 

 with such potters' stamps on them as suffice to assign these also to 

 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At a date so comparatively 

 recent as that of the revolution of 1688, they must have been nearly 

 as familiar throughout Britain and Ireland, as the larger clay pipe of 

 the present day : and yet towards the end of the eighteenth century 

 we find them described in Scottish statistical reports as " Elfin 

 pipes ;" and when at a later date, they attract a wider attention, it 

 is found that, in total independence of each other, the peasantry of 

 England, Scotland, and Ireland, have concurred in ascribing these 

 modern antiques to the Danes, the Elves and the Eairies ! I must 

 confess that the full consideration of all the bearings of this dis- 

 closure of the sources of modern popular belief has greatly modified 

 the faith I once attached to such forms of tradition as memorials of 

 the past. The same people who, by means of Welsh triads, 

 genealogical poems, like the Duan Albannacli and Eireannach, and 

 historical traditions, like the memory of the elder home of the 

 Saxons in the Oleeman's song, could transmit, by oral tradition alone, 

 the chronicles of many generations, now depend so entirely on the 

 chroniclings of the printing press, that they cannot be trusted with 

 the most familiar traditions of a single century. This no doubt only 

 applies to very modern centuries ; but the treacherousness of the 

 historical memory of a rude savage people is sufficiently illustrated 

 be the fact that we search in vain among the Indians of this continent 

 for any tradition of the first intrusion of the white man. 



-A few general remarks on the varying characteristics of the pipes 

 anciently constructed, or now in use among the Indian tribes of 

 North America will not be out of place here, as a means of 

 illustrating the customs and ideas associated at various times, and 

 among different tribes, with the peculiar rites and usages of the pipe 

 as the. special characteristic of the new world. Eor some of the 

 facts relating to the Indians of the north west, I am indebted to the 

 Rev. Dr. O'Meara, missionary among the Chippeways ; to Dr. George 

 Beattie, formerly United States Indian Agent of the Winnebagos, 

 — who have since been driven to desert their old hunting grounds in 



