WOODEN WATER PIPES IN LONDON.
There have recently been discovered in Piccadilly, London, some relics of an early civilization which are primitive enough to have served the wants of aborigines. They are merely treetrunks hollowed out and still having bark on, and were found by men digging a trench for telephone wires. Such pipes were used by the New River Company at the end of the last century.
History states that the earliest water pipes in Britain were undoubtedly of earthenware. They were the work of the Romans, who seem to have been the first to explain to the simple native of the islands the use of a bath. Previously he had been economical as far as water went. Having no house, he needed no “reserve,” and, being without clothes, he was unlikely to require any. He drank from a stream, and apparently preferred roast to boiled. Under the guise of friendship the Romans induced him to store up water and to bathe. Then, weakened, no doubt, by over-indulgence in the insidious liquid, he fell an easy prey to his ingenious foe. Such an earthen pipe—the true cause of England’s undoing—is now to be seen in the British Museum.
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