People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 June 1893 — A PREHISTORIC HABIT. [ARTICLE]

A PREHISTORIC HABIT.

Dried Herbs Did Duty for Tobacco Long Before Raleigh'* Time. The habit of smoking dried herbs in pipes is evidently of enormous antiquity, for both in the British islands and in many parts of Europe and Asia, to say nothing of America, the supposed native land of smoking, pipes of soap stone and red clay, which could not have been used for any other purpose than the burning of some form of fragrant weed,have been discovered in graves and tumuli which date far beyond the dawn of history. With regard to these islands, Pearson’s Weekly thinks there is not the slightest doubt that smoking was practiced long before tobacco was introduced by Hawkins and Raleigh. In the Historic of Plantes, published in 1678, occurs the passage: “The perfume of dried leaves (of coltsfoote) laid upon quicke coles taken into the mouth of a funnell or tunnell helpeth such as are troubled with shortness, of winde and fetch theyreo breath thicke and often.” This points only to the medicinal use of the practice; but if there were any &oubt as to the antiquity of smoking for pleasure among our ancestors it would be disposed of by the following statement of Dr. Petrie, one of the most learned of Irish antiquarians. He says: “Smokiag pipes of bronze are frequently found in our Irish tumuli or sepulchral mounds of the most remote antiquity. On the monument of Donough O'Brien, king of Thommond, who was killed in 1267, and fnterred in the abbey of Corcumrae, in the county of Clare, he is represented in the usual recumbent posture with the short pipe or dhudeen in his mouth.”