Читать книгу The Seven Sisters of Sleep. Popular History of the Seven Prevailing Narcotics of the World онлайн

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The instruments by which the “universal weed” is consumed, are almost as variable in form and material as the nations indulging in their use. The pipe of Holland is of porcelain, and that of our own island of unglazed clay. These latter are made in large quantities, both at home and abroad.10 One factory at St. Omer employs 450 work-people, and produces annually 100,000 gross, or nearly fifteen millions of pipes; and another factory at the same place employs 850 work-people, and produces 200,000 gross, or nearly thirty millions of pipes, consuming nearly eight thousand tons of clay in their manufacture. The quantity of pipes used annually in London is estimated at 364,000 gross, or 52,416,000 pipes; it requires 300 men, each man making 20 gross four dozen per week, for one year, to make them; the cost of which is £40,950. The average length of these pipes is twelve and a half inches; and if laid down in a horizontal position, end to end together, they would reach to the extent of 10,340 miles, 1,600 yards; if they were piled one above another perpendicularly, they would reach 135,138 times as high as St. Pauls; they would weigh 1,137 tons, 10 cwts., and it would require 104 tons, 9 cwts., 32 lbs. of tobacco to fill them. In 1857 we imported clay pipes to the value of £7,614, which cannot be short of 121,000 gross, or seventeen and a half millions. But even with us, pipes were not always of clay. The earliest pipes used in Britain are stated to have been made from a walnut-shell and a straw. Dr. Royle describes a very primitive kind of clay pipe used by some of the natives of India—it is presumed only in cases of necessity. “The amateur makes two holes, one longer than the other, with a piece of stick in a clay soil, inclining the stick so that they may meet; into the shorter hole he places the tobacco, and applies his mouth to the other, and thus, as he lies upon the ground, luxuriates in the fumes of the narcotic herb.”