Searching for Amber.
It is usually found on sea-coasts, after storms, in rounded nodules; or, if scarce on shore, it is sought for by men clad in leather garments, who wade up to their necks in the sea, and scrape the sea-bottom with hooped nets attached to the end of long poles; or (rather dangerous work) men go out in boats, and examine the faces of precipitous cliffs, picking off, by means of iron hooks, the lumps of amber which they may see here and there. Sometimes a piece weighing nearly a pound is found, and a weight of even ten pounds is recorded. As small pieces can easily be joined by smoothing the surfaces, moistening them with linseed oil, and pressing them together over a charcoal fire, and as gum copal is sometimes very like amber, there is much sophistication indulged in, which none but an expert can guard against. In fashioning the nodules of amber, whether genuine or fictitious, into pipe mouth-pieces, they are split on a leaden plate in a turning lathe, smoothed into shape by whet-stones, rubbed with chalk and water, and polished with a piece of flannel. It is an especially difficult kind of work; for unless the amber is allowed frequent intervals for cooling, it becomes electrically excited by the friction and shivers into fragments; the men, too, are put into nervous tremors if kept too long at work at one time. Amber is one of the most electrically excitable of all known substances; in fact, the name electricity itself was derived from electron, the Greek name for amber. Hookahs, chibouques, narghiles, meerschaums, all are largely adorned with amber mouth-pieces. The mouth-piece often consists of two or three pieces of amber, interjoined with ornaments of gold and gems; it is in such case the most costly part of the pipe.
At one of the greater industrial exhibitions four Turkish amames, or amber mouth-pieces, were shown, illustrating clearly enough the value attached to choice specimens; two of them were worth £350 each, two £200 each, diamond studded. The Turkish and Persian pipes have often a small wooden tube inside the amber mouth-piece. They require frequent cleaning with a long wire and a bit of tow, and in some large towns there are professional pipe-cleaners.
The natives of British Guiana have a curious kind of pipe, made of the rind of the fruit of the areca-palm, coiled up into a kind of cheroot, with an internal hollow to hold the tobacco. The poorer Hindoos make a simple pipe of two pieces of bamboo,—one cut close to a knot for the bowl, and a more slender piece for the tube. A lower class of natives in India make two holes of unequal length, with a piece of stick, in a clay soil; the holes are unequally inclined so as to meet at the bottom; the tobacco is placed in the shorter hole, and the smoker, applying his mouth to the longer, inhales the fumes in this primitive fashion. The pipes used for opium-smoking in various parts of the East have small bowls; the drug is too costly to be used otherwise than in small portions at a time, and too powerful to need more than a few whiffs to produce the opium-smoker's dreary delirium.
The Tunisians use reeds for pipes. Stone pipes are found among the natives of Vancouver; while Strong Bow, the North American Indian chief, has his long wooden pipe of peace, decked out with tassels and fringes, but with an ominous-looking sharp steel cutting instrument near the end most remote from the bowl.
Chinese, Japanese, Philippine Islanders, Madagascans, Central Africans, Algerine Arabs, Mexicans, Paraguayans, Siamese, Tahitians, South American Indians, Mongols, Malays, Tartars, Turcomans, as well as the nations of Europe and the chief nations of Southern Asia, all have their smoking-pipes, plain or ornate, as the case may be, and made of wood, reeds, bamboo, bone, ivory, stone, earthenware, glass, porcelain, amber, agate, jade, precious metals and common metals, according to the civilization of the country and the pecuniary means of the smoker.
Fancy Pipes.