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and winterberry leaves are prepared by passing them through the top of the flame, or more leisurely drying them over the fire, without allowing them to burn. Among the Creeks, the Chocktaws, and other Indians in the south, the leaves of the sumach, prepared in a similar manner, answer the like purpose. The leaf of the winterberry, or tea berry, (coltheria procumbens,) has a pleasant aroma, which may have had some influence on its selection. The Indians of the north west ascribe to it the further property of giving them wind, and enabling them to hold out longer in running; but the main object of all such additions appears to be to dilute the tobacco,and thereby admit of its prolonged enjoyment. Having both chewed and smoked the winterberry leaf prepared by the Indians, I am able to speak positively as to the absence of any narcotic qualities, and I presume that with it and all the other additions to the tobacco, the main object is to provide a diluent, so as to moderate the effects, and prolong the enjoyment of the luxury. The same mode is employed with ardent spirits. Mr. Kane remarks of the Chinook Indians: it is a matter of astonishment how very small a quantity of whisky suffices to intoxicate them, although they always dilute it largely in order to prolong the pleasure they derive from drinking.

The custom of increasing the action of the tobacco fumes on the nervous system, by expelling them through the nostrils, though now chiefly confined to the Indians of this continent, appears to have been universally practised when the smoking of tobacco was introduced into the old world. It has been perpetuated in Europe by those who had the earliest opportunities of acquiring the native custom. The Spaniard still expels the smoke through his nostrils, though using a light tobacco, and in such moderation as to render the influence of the narcotic sufficiently innocuous. The Greek sailors in the Levant very frequently retain the same practice, and with less moderation in its use. Melville also describes the Sandwich Islanders, among whom tobacco is of such recent introduction, as having adopted the Indian custom, whether from imitation or by a natural savage instinct towards excess ; and evidence is not wanting to prove that such was the original practice of the English smoker. Paul Hentzner, in his "Journey into England" in 1598,*, among other novelties describes witnessing at the playhouse, the practice, as then newly borrowed from the Indians of Virginia. 'Here," he says, "and everywhere else, the English are

* Malone quotes from epigrams and satires of the same date,-eighteen years before the death of Shakespear,-to prove that playgoers, even at so early a date, were attended by pages, with pipes and tobacco, which they smoked on the stage, where the wits were then wont to sit. Vide Notes and Queries, vol. X., p. 49.

constantly smoking of tobacco, and in this manner: they have pipes on purpose made of clay, into the further end of which they put the herb, so dry that it may be rubbed into powder, and putting fire to it, they draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it plenty of phlegm, and defluxion of the head."

To this it is, that Justice Overdoo refers in Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair,' 66 (Act II, Scene VI.) Nay, the hole in the nose here, of some tobacco-takers, or the third nostril, if I may so call it, which makes that they can vent the tobacco out, like the ace of clubs, or rather the flower-de-lice, is caused from the tobacco, the mere tobacco!" and so also, in a passage already referred to, in Warner's "Albion's England," the "Indian weed fumes away from postrils and from throats" of ladies, as well as lords and grooms.

The minute size of the most ancient of the British tobacco pipes which has led to their designation as those of the Elves or Fairies, may therefore be much more certainly ascribed to the mode of using the tobacco, which rendered the contents of the smallest of them a sufficient dose, than to any economic habits in those who indulged in the novel luxury. In this opinion I am further confirmed by observing the same miniature characteristics mark various specimens of antique native pipes of a peculiar class to which I have already referred as found in Canada, and which appear to be such as, in all probability were in use, and furnished the models of the English clay pipes of the sixteenth century. But if the date thus assigned for the earliest English clay pipes be the true one, it has an important bearing on a much wider question; and as a test of the value to be attached to popular traditions, may suggest the revision of more than one archæological theory based on the trustworthiness of such evidence. A contributor to "Notes and Queries,"* quotes some dogrel lines printed in the "Harleian Miscellany" in 1624, where speaking of the good old times of King Harry the Eighth, smoking is thus Judicrously described as a recent novelty :

"Nor did that time know

To puff and to blow,
In a piece of white clay
As you do at this day,
With fier and coale

And a leafe in a hole!"

These lines are ascribed in the original to Skelton, who died in 1529, and by a course of reasoning which seems to run somewhat in *Notes and Queries. Vol. VII, p. 230.

a circle, it is assumed that they cannot be his, because tobacco was not introduced into England "till 1565 or thereabouts." Brand in his "Popular Antiquities," ascribes its introduction to Drake in 1586; while the old keep at Cawdor, already referred to, with its sculptured reynard and his pipe, would carry it back to 1510, and by implication still nearer the fifteenth century. So peculiar a custom as smoking, would no doubt, at first be chiefly confined to such as had acquired a taste for it in the countries from whence it was borrowed, and until its more general diffusion had created a demand for tobacco, as well as for the pipe required for its use, the smoker who had not acquired an Indian pipe along with the "Indian weed," would have to depend on chance, or his own ingenuity, for the materials requisite for its enjoyment. Hence an old diarist writing about 1680, tells us of the tobacco smokers :-" They first bad 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 'twas scandalous for a divine to take tobacco. It was then sold for its weight in silver. I have heard some of our old yeomen 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 abundant use, 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 interogatories, 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