Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/192

180 pipe was regarded in America is furnished by the mound pipes, upon which the native sculptors expended a much greater amount of patient and careful labor than they devoted to any other implement. So skillfully executed are they that Dr. Rau does not hesitate to affirm that modern artists would find no small difficulty in reproducing them, even with the great advantage of metallic tools. These facts seem to have impressed themselves strongly upon the mind of the late Sir Daniel Wilson, who many years ago investigated thoroughly the narcotic arts and superstitions of the Americans, and to whom the writer is indebted for the main idea of the present paper. The mound pipes are, indeed, a suggestive theme, though the conclusions which archaeologists have drawn from them are by no means unanimous. A remarkable depository of carved pipes was unearthed by Squier and Davis in one of the mounds of the group known as Mound City, in Ohio. From a single hearth they took nearly two hundred finely sculptured pipes, many of them, however, being broken and injured by the action of fire. Recalling the sacred associations connected in the mind of the Indian with the tobacco plant and the instrument of its use, theorists have found in this mound a possible altar devoted exclusively to nicotian rites. Without discussing the motives which may have led the builders of the mounds to deposit so many of these pipes in one place, we may assume with some confidence that the carved pipes were most probably totems. "Their sacred nature," remarks Henshaw, "would enable us to understand how naturally pipes would be selected as the medium for totemic representations."

Leaving for a time the regions where the pipe occupies so prominent a place in religious rites, we find, on approaching the Rio Grande, that the use of tobacco becomes of far less frequent occurrence. In the pueblos of the Southwest very few pipes have been found. The Indians of this region have, however, a sacred cigarette, the antiquity of which is indicated by repeated allusions to it in the pueblo folk lore. The Navajos share with the Moquis the smoke-prayer, in which the sacred smoke of the cigarette is blown east, north, west, and south, to propitiate the good spirits and drive away the evil ones. Gushing observed that the older men of Zuñi, in smoking cigarettes, would blow the smoke in different directions, closing their eyes, and muttering a few words which he regarded as invocations. In Mexico and Central America the pipe reappears, though here it is evidently of much less importance than in the North. One prominent example of its application to religious uses is furnished by Diego de Landa. In his Relación de Cosas de Yucatan, describing the curious native ceremony of baptism he says: "Tras esto (the priest) ivan los demas ayudantes del sacerdote con un manojo de flores y un