but Mr. Kane having persuaded the Cree chief to sit for his portrait, he witnessed the ceremony of "opening the medicine pipe-stem," as it is called, and during its progress had to smoke each of the eleven pipes before he could be allowed to commence his work. His spirited portrait represents the grim old chief, decorated with his war-paint, and holding in his hand a medicine pipestem, elaborately adorned with the head and plumes of an eagle.

All this ceremonial, and the peculiar sanctity attached to the pipe-stem, apart from the pipe, are special characteristics of the Red Indian of the North-west, of which no trace is apparent in the singular memorials of the ancient Mound-Builders, or in the sculptures and paintings of Mexico. The pipes of the Mound-Builders are complete, with their short flattened mouth-piece adapted to the lips; and the same is the case with ancient Mexican examples. Throughout the whole elaborate illustrations of Lord Kingsborough's great work, the traces of Mexican usages connected with the tobaccopipe are rare, and in no one can I discern anything which appears to represent a pipe-stem. In vol. iv. plate 17, of a series copied from a Mexican painting preserved at Pass, in Hungary, a figure coloured as a black, carries in his hand a plain white pipe, somewhat of the form of the larger clay pipes found in Canada and in the State of New York, and from the bowl rise yellow flames. 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 to be a small clay tobaccopipe, from whence smoke proceeds. One or two other pictures appear to represent figures putting the green tobacco, 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 only confirm the idea that the tobacco-pipe was not invested in Mexico or Central America with 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 but no less peculiar forms, are reverently maintained among the native tribes of the North-west.

Having thus followed out with some minuteness the native memorials of the American pipe, we cannot hesitate to infer from the varied evidence thus afforded that the singular practice of smoking the burning leaves of the tobacco plant reveals itself among the remotest traces of human arts in the New World. When we turn from archæological to philological evidence, it is only to receive confirmation of this idea. The terms existing in the widely diversified native vocabularies are as irreconcilable with the idea of the introduction of tobacco as a recently borrowed novelty among the northern tribes of the American continent, as the varied practices and venerable legends and superstitions associated with its use. We learn from the narrative of Father Francisco Creuxio, that the Jesuit missionaries of the seventeenth century found tobacco in abundant use among the Indians of Canada. So early as 1629 he describes the Hurons as smoking immoderately the dried leaves and stalks of the nicotian plant, commonly called tobacco or petune. Another of the nations of Upper Canada received from the French the name of Petuns, from their extensive cultivation of the same favourite plant, which constituted an object of traffic with the Indians of the lower St. Lawrence. This term appears to be of Floridan origin, and was perhaps introduced by the missionaries themselves from the southern vocabulary. But the Chippewa name for tobacco is asamah, seemingly a native

radical of onomatopoeic origin, and having no other significance or application. So also the Chippewas have the word butta to express smoke, as the smoke of a fire but for tobacco fumes they employ a distinct term: bucwanay, literally, “it smokes," the puckwana of Longfellow's Hiawatha. Opwahgun is a "tobacco-pipe;" and with the peculiar power of compound words and inflections, so remarkable in the languages of tribes so rude as those of the American forests, we have from this root nipwahguneka, “I make pipes;" kipwahguneka, “thou makest pipes;" pwahguneka, "he makes pipes;" etc. So also nisuggaswa, "I smoke a pipe;" kisuggaswa, "thou smokest;" suggaswa, "he smokes," etc. While, therefore, Europe has borrowed the name of the Indian weed from that portion of the New World first visited by its Genoese discoverer: the language of the great Algonquin nation exhibits an ancient and entirely independent northern vocabulary associated with the use of tobacco, betraying none of the traces of compounded descriptive terms so discernible in all those applied to objects of European origin. The practice of smoking narcotics is interwoven with all their habits, so that they even reckon time by pipes, using such word-sentences as ningopwahgun, “I was one pipe [of time] about it."

The practice thus traceable through the languages, arts, and customs of America, has had a very precise date assigned to the first knowledge of it by Europeans; though the opinion is far from being one of universal acceptance. In the first week of November 1492, two sailors landed from the caravel of Columbus to explore part of the coast of Cuba, and among others of the strange reports which they brought back to the great commander, they told him of having seen the natives carrying a lighted firebrand, and perfuming themselves by puffing from their mouths and noses a burning herb,

which it would seem they used in the form of a cigar rolled up in the dried leaves of the maize or Indian corn. The story of its later introduction by Raleigh into England is well known; and the famous Counterblaste to Tobacco, promulgated by King James, gives a marked prominence to the revival, if not to the origin of the custom in England so late as the seventeenth century.

The history of the custom thus dignified by the assaults of royalty, and against certain uses of which the supreme pontiff, Urban VIII., fulminated the thunders of the Church, has attracted considerable attention in modern times on various grounds, but especially in reference to the question, whether the practice of smoking narcotics, or the use and peculiar properties of tobacco, were known to the old world prior to the discovery of America. The green tobacco, Nicotiana rustica, cultivated in Thibet, western China, Northern India, and Syria, is a different species from the American plant; and while it is affirmed by some to have been brought from America, and even the precise date of 1570 is assigned for its importation into Britain, high authorities in botany are still found to maintain the indigenous character of the Nicotiana rustica, in some parts of the Old World, as in Northern India, where it is stated to grow wild. Du Walde (1793) speaks of tobacco as one of the natural productions of Formosa, whence it was largely imported by the Chinese; and Savary, Olearius, Chardin, and other writers, are all quoted1 to show that the Nicotiana Persica, which furnishes the famous Shiraz tobacco, is not only indigenous to Persia, but that it was used for smoking from very early times. That all the varieties of the Nicotiana are not confined to the New World, is unquestionable. Of some fifty-eight admitted species, the great majority are indeed American, but a few 1 A. C. M. Exeter. Notes and Queries, vol. ii. p. 154.

belong to the newer world of Australia, besides those believed to be indigenous to Asia. It is not surprising, therefore, that after all the attention which this subject has latterly, on various accounts, attracted, writers should be found to maintain the opinion that the use of tobacco as a narcotic was known and practised by Asiatics prior to the discovery of America. The oriental use of tobacco may indeed be carried back to an era old enough to satisfy the keenest stickler for the antiquity of the practice, if he is not too nice as to his authorities. Dr. Yates, in his Travels in Egypt, describes a painting which he saw on one of the tombs at Thebes, containing the representation of a smoking party. But this is modern compared with a record said to exist in the works of the early fathers, and, at any rate, preserved as an old tradition of the Greek Church, which ascribes the inebriation of the patriarch Noah to the temptation of the Devil by means of tobacco; so that King James was not, after all, without authority for the black Stygian parentage he assigns to its fumes!

Professor Johnston-who marshals various authorities on the Asiatic use of tobacco for smoking, prior to the discovery of America, without venturing on any very definite opinion of his own,--quotes Pallas as arguing in favour of the antiquity of the practice from its extensive prevalence in Asia, and especially in China. It would, indeed, be an important addition to the arguments in favour of a Mongol origin for the American aborigines, if it could be shown that the most characteristic and universal of all their practices is derived from an Asiatic and Mongol source. But the ethnological bearings of the argument were not perceived when it was thus advanced, and their very comprehensiveness compels us to weigh with the more critical caution the evidence by which it is sustained.

"Among the Chi