While the tobacco-pipe was thus evolving in North America apparently a two-piece pipe arose independently in South America. In the upper part of the southern continent true pipes were not used, though the Y-shaped tube, of which we have already heard, was employed for inhaling snuff. Otherwise cigar smoking was the ordinary form of indulgence in tobacco. But in South Brazil in 165o the traveller Jan Nieuhoff found a great Indian tribe smoking pipes with bowls made of nut-shells and with stems of reed or hollowed wood. This kind of pipe, with a small bowl, was the prototype of the pipes of Turkey, Persia and the Far East, since the Portuguese took it with them from Brazil along their trade-route in the Old World. Much larger pipes were also used by the same Brazilian tribe, with bowls of stone, clay, or wood, and are found to-day among their descend ants, now living on the Upper Amazon.
The two-piece pipe is also found in the steppes of Central and Western Asia, and the Kalahiri region of South Africa. Both these are woodless countries, scantily inhabited by people mostly nomadic. Here "earth-smoking" is found. The most primitive method is to dig a small pit in the ground, to serve as a bowl; to insert a stick through the earth to the bottom of this pit ; and then to withdraw the stick, leaving a hollow tube. The smoker has to lie flat on the ground and apply his mouth to the end of the tube. An improvement on this uncomfortable method is the fashioning of a rough bowl of clay above the surface of the ground, with a tube formed as before with the aid of a stick. Such an earth-pipe, wher dry, can be detached and carried about. The insertion of a separate mouthpiece into the end of the hollow tube would convert it into a two-piece pipe. In quite a different part of the world, among some of the North American Indians, a hollow reed stuck into a bowl made of wet clay is said to serve as an emergency pipe.
The credit of the first invention of the pipe cannot be assigned to any one people nor is it certain that smoke proceeded always fro'm tobacco-leaf. There is hemp, which, in many parts of the world at least, long preceded tobacco. There are many herbs, such as henbane, which were commonly used in Europe, for how many centuries we do not know. Opium-smoking, on the other hand, is a late development. Early evidence concerning the tobacco-pipe comes from America only, for the reason that the tobacco-plant is a native of America. The theory that both the plant and the habit of smoking derived originally from Africa and reached the western coast of America by way of the Indian and Pa cific Oceans, rests on an insufficient basis. Smoking, no doubt, is a custom of great antiquity in Africa ; but it is the smoking of hemp, as exemplified notably among the Bushmen of the Kalahiri Desert. The evolution in Africa of the pipe for hemp-smoking has, so far as we can tell, been from the earth-pit, through the simple tube, to the Dakka (hemp) pipe, which is the ancestor of the water-pipes of various kinds used for tobacco in the East. Among the Bushmen an animal's horn, generally an antelope's, is used as the water-vessel. Among other African tribes ox-horns, gourds, bamboos and wooden stems are to be seen. It was thus the African hemp-smokers who gave to the smokers of tobacco this idea of using a pipe in which fumes should be filtered and cooled by passing through water.