266 Mound Pipes. [April, 



implement was complete in one piece, so that all parts were 

 equally durable. The facts that such pipes had expended upon 

 them all of the ingenuity and skill at the command of the sculp- 

 tor, and that they were usually placed in association with human 

 remains, go far to prove that they were invested, to a considerable 

 degree, with 1 a religious, or at least a mortuary, significance. " The 

 remarkable characteristics of their elaborately'sculptured pipes, 

 and their obvious connection with services accompanying some of 

 the rites of sacrifice or cremation, tend," as Dr. Wilson observes, 

 " to suggest very different associations with the pipe of those an- 

 cient centuries from such as now pertain to its familiar descendant. 

 Embodying, as these highly-finished implements did, the result 

 of so much labor, as well as of artistic skill, there are not want- 

 ing highly suggestive reasons for the opinion, that the elaborate 

 employment of the imitative arts on the pipe-heads found depos- 

 ited in the mounds, may indicate their having played an import- 

 ant part in the religious solemnities of the ancient race." 



The typical mound pipe is of the " monitor" form, as it may be 

 termed, possessing a short, cylindrical, urn, or spool-shaped bowl, 

 rising from the center of a flat and slightly curved base. Fig. I 

 is an illustration of an example from a mound in Ross county, 

 Ohio, which is now deposited in the National Museum at Wash- 

 ington. Pipes of this form average three or four inches in 

 length, but an extraordinary specimen formerly in the collection 

 of Mr. O. A. Jenison, of Lansing, Mich., measures six and five- 

 eighths inches. 



The most important and interesting discovery of mound pipes 

 was made by Messrs. Squier and Davis, during their explora- 

 tions in the valley of the Mississippi, about a third of a century 

 ago. From a small sacrificial tumulus in the vicinity of " Mound 

 City," Ohio, they obtained nearly two hundred stone pipes. 

 Many of these, according to the report of the discoverers, " were 

 much broken up, some of them calcined by the heat, which had 

 been sufficiently strong to melt copper, masses of which were 

 found fused together in the center of the basin. A large number 

 have nevertheless been restored, at the expense of much labor 

 and no small amount of patience. They are mostly composed of 

 a red porphyritic stone, somewhat resembling the pipe stone of 

 the Coteau des Prairies excepting that it is of great hardness and 

 interspersed with small variously colored granules. * * 



