After this is it any wonder that the collector’s instinct should have led me to be enthusiastic about Chinese snuff-bottles as a field for browsing? And soon I found that the fascination of these little objects of art had exerted no small influence on other collectors. Fine snuff-bottles were not to be found at every turning. Nevertheless they were not so rare as one might imagine, although, as with any other class of art objects, supreme examples were difficult to obtain at any price. If China has a population of four hundred million souls it must not be assumed that her craftsmen have produced anything like four hundred million snuff-bottles. True it is that men, women, and children of China smoke, but they do not all take snuff. Nearly all of these bottles that we see in collections are, perhaps, snuff-bottles, though many of them were used for medicines, as the Chinese were great medicine-consumers. They used medicines when well--which was most of the time--in diminutive doses, perhaps as charms, and when ill in quantities that would amaze and frighten us. Hecate and her witches never prepared caldron more terrific than the Chinese physician of yesterday devised for his certainly suffering patient. The famous _materia medica_ of herbal which Li Shi-chin spent thirty years in preparing, a work published in 1590, contained over eighteen hundred prescriptions dear to the heart, though I fear disastrous to the well-being of the Chinese invalid pro-tem. Gallon containers would not have sufficed for some of these prescriptions, while others--the least virulent, and therefore to be toyed with--were harbored in the tiny bottles that snuff was, later, to usurp. Miniature Chinese bottles found in Egypt and in Asia Minor--bottles of porcelain bearing inscriptions in Chinese from the Chinese poets--show that in the tenth century communication already existed between the extreme boundaries of Asia. Arabs traded at Canton and Hangchow to the end of the Sung dynasty, 1279. These little bottles were probably used by the Arabs for kohl, the black substance with which they painted their eyelashes. Sixty years before Li Shi-chin’s herbal--“Pun tsao” was its title--tobacco was introduced into China, and before long tobacco as snuff became popular and fashionable. Among the ornamental articles of Chinese adornment, says an authority on eastern costume, in none do they go to so much expense and style as in the snuff-bottle, which is often carved from stone, amber, agate, and other rare minerals with most exquisite taste. Jade, of course, was most precious of all and often imitated in glass, as were topaz, amethyst, tourmaline, amber, and other stones and substances. Collectors in Europe and America are beginning to realize what interesting things in the way of snuff-bottles the Chinese glass-worker produced.