OF THE OLD AND NEW WORLD. 339 



ilames. On plate 57 of the same volume, copied from a Mexican 

 painting in the Borgian Museum, in the College of the Propaganda 

 at Rome, may be seen another figure, holding what seems a small 

 clay tobacco pipe, from whence smoke proceeds. One or two other 

 pictures appear to represent figures putting the green tobacco leaf, 

 or some other leaf, into the pipe, if indeed the instrument held in 

 the hand be not rather a ladle or patera. But any such illustrations 

 are rare, and somewhat uncertain ; and it appears to be undoubted 

 that tbe tobacco pipe was not invested in Central America with any 

 of those singular and sacred attributes which we must believe to 

 have attached to it among the ancient Mound Builders of the 

 Mississippi Valley ; and which under other, and no less peculiar 

 forms, are reverently maintained among the native tribes of the 

 North-West, constituting one of the most characteristic peculiarities 

 of the American aborigines, and one well deserving of the careful 

 study of the Ethnologist. 



Assuming it as a fact, demonstrated by a variety of independent 

 evidence, that the singular practice of smoking narcotics originated 

 anion c the native tribes of America, and was commuuicated for the 

 first time to the Old World, after its discovery by Columbus, it 

 becomes a subject w r ell worthy of consideration how rapid and 

 universal was the diffusion of this custom throughout the world. 

 Not only have Europe and Asia, in later times, disputed with 

 America the origin of this luxurious narcotic art ; but travellers 

 who return from the mysterious tropical centre of old Africa find 

 there, in like manner, the use of the tobacco pipe, among tribes to 

 whom the sight of the first white man is strange and repulsive. 

 Such facts are worthy of very careful consideration by the Ethnologist.. 

 They prove how fallacious is that mode of reasoning, which, in treat- 

 ing of the natural history of man, takes no account of the predomi- 

 nating influences of reason, intellect, and experience, as manifested 

 even among the rudest savages ; and seeks to apply the same law to 

 man as the lower animals. They serve also to illustrate the indirect 

 means by which the influences of a remote civilization may be 

 extended, and thereby to explain some of the singular coincidences 

 with which the Archaeologist is familiar, in the traces of widely 

 diffused primitive arts. 



The daring traveller Charles John Andersson, the first explorer of 

 the country of the Dainaras, in his "Lake Ngami," furnishes the 

 following interesting account of the African use of the weed : 



"The Hill-Damaras subsist chiefly upon the few wild roots which their sterile 



