154 TOBACCO-PIPES, CIGARS, ETC. 



origin. "We may not be able to account for the fact, 

 but the fact remains — 



The thing we know is neither rich nor rare, 

 But wonder how the devil it got there." 



Tobacco-stoppers of the age of George II. have 

 been found with Eoman remains in England, and 

 engraved as Eoman bronzes. Copper coins, from 

 Charles II. downwards, have been found at great 

 depths in the ground, and mixed with Roman remains. 

 One mode of accounting for this may be in the faci- 

 lities afforded for burial by deep fissures in seasons 

 of drought, or holes of rabbits, rats, or moles ; another 

 in the results of the constant turning of the earth by 

 the plough ; and the fact that Roman antiquities are 

 sometimes a very short distance below the surface ; 

 and another, and probably the best solution, that in 

 all excavations the ground from the sides rolls down 

 to the centre, and reveals for the first time, at the 

 bottom of a hole, that which came from the top. We 

 may be certain, that no authenticated discovery of 

 Celtic or Roman antiquities, where the ground has 

 been entirely undisturbed, includes tobacco-pipes. 



Sometimes these advocates for ancient smoking 

 prove too much. Thus when the Turkish traveller 

 Eulia Effendi assures us he found a tobacco-pipe 

 imbedded in the wall of an edifice constructed before 

 the birth of Mahomet ; his desire to " make assurance 

 doubly sure " by declaring it still retained the smell of 

 tobacco smoke, leads us to conclude with the author of a 



