Our gossip about the Indian weed may now be brought to a close with a few words about its co-partner, the pipe. For even tobacco-pipes, like all other products of men’s ingenuity, awaken interest all the more engrossing when little else remains to tell the story of those who made them and used them. They carry the imagination back to those shadowy palaces of the Incas and Aztecs, where equally shadowy potentates smoked out of pipes made of precious metals, or of highly polished and richly-gilt wood. Pipes indeed, present features highly interesting to a much larger class than to professed ethnologists. The wide region over which they are found, buried in mounds and tumuli extending from the north-west coast of America to the plains of Patagonia, tell us how universal was the habit of smoking on that vast continent; while similarity of structure suggests a common origin. Curious specimens have been found in the States of Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, and in the great Mississippi valley, varying from the simplest forms made out of baked clay with a plain cylinder or urn, to others of a class, very uniform in type, cut out of porphyry in a single piece. These latter have a slightly convey base measuring about four inches in length, and one inch broad, with the bowl on the centre. A fine hole pierces the pipe from end to end of the base to the bottom of the bowl, the opposite end being obviously designed for the smoker to hold in the hand. Others are remarkable for a fine display of artistic skill in the carving of birds, mammals, reptiles and human heads, often fanciful and grotesque, but always vigorously expressed. In Mexico elaborately moulded and ornamented pipes have been found, along with others of a type almost identical with our common clay pipe. And in British Columbia pipes are occasionally met with in the possession of the native Indians, moulded and carved by themselves in almost every variety of fantastic form, and with tracery that would do no discredit to modern art. These are for the most part made of blue slate-clay, and have intricate pierced work carried through the tube. In old Indian grave-mounds Messrs. Squier & Davis, in the course of their explorations in 1846-7, found pipes cut into the form of human heads, the features on which were singularly truthful and expressive; and what was still more remarkable was their strikingly Mongolian type, a circumstance which lends support to the hypothesis that in the remote past the American continent was peopled from the eastern part of Asia. Some of the pipes found in these mounds represented animals peculiar to the lower latitudes. On one pipe the otter is shown in the attitude of holding a fish in its mouth: on another the heron has seized a fish; the hawk is grasping a small bird, and with its beak is in the act of tearing it to pieces. Almost every bird and animal common to the country is found boldly carved on the pipes of the aborigines of America.