Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/255

 strongly conical, being three fourths of an inch in diameter across the top and only a sixteenth of an inch at the bottom. On the flat upper side of the stem there are rudely scratched outline figures, as seen at A, and there are also outlines on the rim of the



bowl. The surface of this pipe is well polished. The inside of the bowl shows both circular and vertical striæ.

Stone tubes, of somewhat different form in different localities, have been found in almost every station which has been carefully searched for archæological specimens, and few objects have excited greater curiosity than these. Always well made, often of handsomely colored and veined stone, they have been regarded as pipes, musical instruments, medicine tubes, and even telescopes, by different authors. When one examines these tubes he very readily sees that it is more than probable that all can not be placed in the same class, for, not only do they vary in size very widely—some being only two inches long and of small diameter, while others are ten, fifteen, and rarely twenty inches in length—but the bore is even more variable, in some being as large as the outside will allow, and of uniform size from end to end; in others it is large at one end and grows smaller toward the opposite end, where it is often of no greater diameter than the bore of some of the pipestems. Very likely the tubes of the first sort were used in the performances of the medicine man, and those last named were used as pipes, as are the very similar pipes smoked to this day by Utes and other West coast tribes. The tubes appear to be everywhere rare, and yet no form of pipe so often occurs in the Champlain Valley, especially on the Vermont side.

Our Vermont tubes have a bore which is very much smaller at one end than at the other, and the small end was, I think, always stopped partially by a rudely ground and imperfectly fitting stone plug, as it certainly was in most cases, for we find the plug in some of the tubes. The general form of the tubes of this region is somewhat