rials requisite for its enjoyment. Hence an old diarist, writing about 1680, tells us of the tobacco-smokers :"They first had silver pipes, but the ordinary sort made use of a walnut shell and a straw. I have heard my grandfather say that one pipe was handed from man to man round the table. Within these thirty-five years

It was

'twas scandalous for a divine to take tobacco. then sold for its weight in silver. I have heard some of our old yeoman neighbours say, that when they went to market they culled out their biggest shillings to lay in the scales against the tobacco; now the customs of it are the greatest his majestie hath." In the interval between the primitive walnut-shell pipe, or the single clay pipe for a whole company to partake of the costly luxury, and this later era of its abundance, the supply of pipes had, no doubt, kept pace with that of the tobacco, and they had undergone such alterations in form as were requisite to adapt them to its later mode of use. Their material also had become so uniform, and so well recognised, that a clay pipe appears to have been regarded, in the seventeenth century, as the sole implement applicable to the smoker's art. An old string of rhymed interrogatories, printed in Wit's Recreations, a rare miscellany of 1640, thus quaintly sets forth this idea:

"If all the world were sand,

Oh, then, what should we lack'o ;
If, as they say, there were no clay,
How should we take tobacco?"

Towards the latter end of the sixteenth, and in the early years of the seventeenth century, under any view of the case, small clay pipes, such as Teniers and Ostade put into the mouths of their boors, must have been in common use throughout the British Islands. They have been dredged in numbers from the bed of the Thames,

found in abundance on various sites in England and Ireland, where the soldiers 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 primitive, Roman, and mediæval 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 fairies! I must confess that a full consideration of all the bearings of this disclosure 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 Albannach and Eireannach, and historical traditions, like the memory of the elder home of the Saxons in the Gleeman's Song, could transmit, by oral tradition alone, the chronicles of many generations, now depend so entirely on the printingpress, that they cannot be trusted with the most familiar traditions of a single century.

In one other point of view the present inquiry leads to results of some significance in their bearing on the

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D

favourite idea of American ethnologists relative to the indigenous origin of the red race. The principal varieties of the tobacco plant pertain to the flora of the New World, and it has been cultivated there from time immemorial in every variety of climate, from the tropical regions of the Northern and Southern continents to the country around the shores of Georgian Bay. Throughout the tribes and nations scattered over the same wide area of varied regions and climates, this plant has been used by the indigenous races as though guided by an instinctive perception of its adaptation to their peculiar constitution. Yet when the European discovers the New World, he exhibits no such inaptitude as might be conceived for the novel usage, so foreign to all his tastes and habits; but, on the contrary, he at once indulges in the intoxicating fumes with an impunity altogether beyond the capacity of the native smoker of the indigenous plant. Transferred to Europe, Asia, and Africa, the strange narcotic is speedily naturalized in all; and soon the pipe becomes as indissolubly associated in our minds with the dreamy luxuriousness of the oriental with Egypt, India, Persia, and European Turkey,—as with the New World from whence it came. But in all, the constitutional power of the human frame to resist the intoxicating effects of the narcotic vapour, proves to be greater than in the native habitats of the Nicotiana tabacum and the indigenous races by whom its virtues were revealed to the world. Here, at least, we look in vain for that relation between the peculiar fauna and flora of American "realms," which has been supposed to constitute one of the strongest arguments for the indigenous origin of the Red Man on that western continent where alone his type now exists.

CHAPTER XVII.

PRIMITIVE ARCHITECTURE: MEGALITHIC.

THE primitive architecture of the American continent presents, in its gigantic earth-pyramids, hill-forts, and river-terrace enclosures, the familiar forms of earliest constructive skill, found wherever the. footprints of infantile human progress remain uneffaced by the works of later intruders. There, however, such traces of the combined labour of man in the earlier stages of transition, from the nomade hunter to the settled claimant of the soil, present themselves to our study on a scale, as to number and magnitude, alike without a parallel among such earth-types of the walled cities of Nimrod, and the pyramids of Cheops or Cephrenes. They are the characteristic memorials of the partially developed but long extinct civilisation of that mysterious people, known from such remains as the race of the Mound-Builders. Their structures could not gather richness from the fretting tooth of time. They were truly builders, but not architects. Buried beneath their ancient mounds lie sculptures fit to vie with the most grotesque, and also with some of the most beautiful adornments of mediæval architecture; but on the edifices themselves, so far as now appears, they expended none of that decorative design which elevates the constructive art of the builder into one of the fine arts, and blends together the ornamental and the useful into the most eloquent and

enduring of all national chronicles. To study the true native architecture of the New World, we have to leave behind us those monuments of old forgotten generations of the Mississippi Valley, and, amid the tropical forests of Central America and Yucatan, explore the silent memorials of a no less mysterious but more eloquent past. There that lamp of memory was lit which still glows for us with the golden stains of time; and its ruined reliquaries rise amid a tropical vegetation so luxurious, that the very air is oppressive from the fragrance of the banana, pine-apple, orange, lemon, and plantain. There still tower above forests dense with the growth of ages, ruined temples which stood before the cocoa-nut, palm, and the gigantic ceiba encroached on their abandoned courts and terraced walls; and into which the men of long-buried generations built their love of power, their wealth of thought and strength, and all their proudest aspirations of hope and faith.

It was at Copan that the enterprising explorer of the historical antiquities of Central America first beheld the forgotten memorials of its ancient civilisation; and, as he says, with an interest perhaps stronger than he had ever felt in wandering among the ruins of Egypt, he explored, amid the dense forest in which they were buried, the remains of an ancient city, some of the monuments of which, to his experienced eye, presented, with more elegance of design, a workmanship equal to the finest monuments of Egypt. Here at length were not only traces of the obliterated history of an unknown race, but "works of art, proving, like newly-discovered historical records, that the people who once occupied the continent of America were not savages." Toiling onward through the tangled growth of tropical vegetation, intermingled with friezes and fragments of statuary, and ascending the steps of a vast enclosure, terraced