Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and CommerceBillings, E. R.
History
Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce
Billings, E. R.
Tobacco -- History; Tobacco industry -- History; Tobacco use
"I remember a man once bringing me some fragments of Roman
pottery and other things of the same period, which he had
turned up in the course of excavations, and among them was a
Tobacco stopper formed of a Sacheverell medal! and a George
II. half-penny, all of which he was ready to swear he had
found "all of a heap together," inside a hypocaust tile,
which, on examination, certainly had remained _in situ_ from
Romano-British times! The cupidity of a man had evidently
led him to collect together these odds and ends, and try to
turn them to profitable account. Some twenty years ago, a
large number of "elfin pipes" were dug up at Bomington, near
Edinburgh, along with a quantity of placks or bodles of
James VI., which thus gave trustworthy evidence of their
true date. Others were found in the ancient cemetery at
North Berwick, adjoining to which is a small Romanesque
building of the Twelfth Century, close upon the shore.
Within the last half-century, the sea has made very great
inroads upon this ancient burial-place, carrying off a
considerable ruin, and exposing the skeletons, and bringing
to light many interesting relics at almost every
spring-tide. Among these, many pipes have been washed down.
A similar circumstance has occurred on the seashore at Hoy
Lake, Cheshire, where several "fairy pipes" have been found.
"Notices of several discoveries occur. Dr. Wilson says, in
the statistical accounts of Scotland, many of which are
suggestive of a pre-Raleigh period. Thus, 'in an ancient
British encampment in the parish of Kirk Michael,
Dumfriesshire, on the farm of Gilrig, a number of pipes of
burnt clay were dug up, with heads smaller than the modern
tobacco-pipes, swelled at the middle and straighter at the
top. Again, in the vicinity of a group of standing stones at
Cairney Mount, in the parish of Carluke Lanarkshire, a celt
or stone hatchet, elfin bolts (flint and bone arrow-heads),
elfin pipes, numerous coins of the Edwards and of later
date, and other things are all stated to have been found.'
An example is also recorded of the discovery of a
tobacco-pipe in sinking a pit for coal, at Misk, in
Ayrshire, after digging through many feet of sand. All these
notes are pregnant with significant warnings of the
necessity for cautious discrimination in determining the
antiquity of such buried relics."
In Turkey the jasmine is cultivated for the purpose of pipe smoking.
Barillet describes the growing of the common jasmine near
Constantinople. He says:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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