ANCIENT IRISH PIPES

It is not even certain that the use of tobacco was not known to the
colonists from Atlantis settled in Ireland in an age long prior to Sir
Walter Raleigh. Great numbers of pipes have been found in the raths and
tumuli of Ireland, which, there is every reason to believe, were placed
there by men of the Prehistoric Period. The illustration on p. 63
represents some of the so-called "Danes' pipes" now in the collection of
the Royal Irish Academy. The Danes entered Ireland many centuries before
the time of Columbus, and if the pipes are theirs, they must have used
tobacco, or some substitute for it, at that early period. It is
probable, however, that the tumuli of Ireland antedate the Danes
thousands of years.

ANCIENT INDIAN PIPE, NEW JERSEY

Compare these pipes from the ancient mounds of Ireland with the
accompanying picture of an Indian pipe of the Stone Age of New Jersey.
("Smithsonian Rep.," 1875, p. 342.)

Recent Portuguese travellers have found the most remote tribes of savage
negroes in Africa, holding no commercial intercourse with Europeans,
using strangely shaped pipes, in which they smoked a plant of the
country. Investigations in America lead to the conclusion that tobacco
was first burnt as an incense to the gods, the priest alone using the
pipe; and from this beginning the extraordinary practice spread to the
people, and thence over all the world. It may have crossed the Atlantic
in a remote age, and have subsequently disappeared with the failure of
retrograding colonists to raise the tobacco-plant.