The chibouks and narghillés are symbols of luxury and wealth among the Osmanlis, as services of silver are appendages of elegant life to the Europeans, and there is great ambition to excel each other in the costliness of their appurtenances of smoking. Many of the pashas and other men of wealth, possess chibouks to the value of $50,000, ranging from $10 upwards. Sultan Mahmoud was forced to issue an edict forbidding the hosts to present them to visitors, and ordering that every one should provide his own chibouk. Hence the appendage to all gentlemen of rank of a Chibouk-gy, who always accompanies his master. The narghillés or hookahs are also very popular, and often of exquisite workmanship; but pipes being more portable and handy, are generally preferred. The effort necessary to draw the smoke from the narghillé is, by some, considered as objectionable, but a little practice soon habituates to its use, and certainly with this instrument we have the smoke in its greatest purity. But it is not only the utility and beauty of the long chibouk which constitute the Osmanlis the best and most philosophical smokers. There is no tobacco in the world so delicious as the Turkish; so varied in its degrees of narcotic strength, or so carefully prepared, and a taste once being acquired for this species of the plant, all other varieties become intolerable. A growing taste for this tobacco has of late been acquired in America, and the increasing demand for this article has induced speculators to flood the market with spurious imitations or adulterations both imported and of home manufacture. Even in Turkey the greatest connoisseurs can, with difficulty, procure the best species; there are so many varieties offered for sale; the very worst kind, of which so much is exported to America, being from Smyrna and its immediate neighborhood. The tobacco most valued, and justly so, for its pure and aromatic flavor, is only raised in a small district of Thessaly, in European Turkey, and is called Yenijé tobacco, from the name of the region where it is cultivated. There has been concocted a peculiar kind or brand of the plant under the title of scafarlatti, which seems to have gained great celebrity in the United States as being the genuine Turkish article. This appellation is as yet unknown in Turkey, and must have sprung from the inventive brain of some one of the Barnum race, who would even enlarge the Turkish vocabulary at the expense of the lingua Italiana. Not to notice the Western nations, who, with their clay pipes, have remained in statu quo in the art of smoking, the Germans deserve some criticism: for they have made many attempts to arrive at perfection. The material of which the German pipe-bowls are made, poetically called meerschaum, is ill adapted for the purpose, and the forms of their stems and mouth-pieces imply entire ignorance of the science of smoking.