instrument to which it first belonged, and is used to describe tubes of various sorts, gas-pipes, water-pipes, and pipes in general. There is nothing unusual in these transitions of meaning, which are in fact rather the rule than the exception. The chibouk was originally a herdsman's pipe or flute in Central Asia. The calumet, popularly ranked with the tomahawk and the mocassin among characteristic Red Indian words, is only the name for a shepherd's pipe (Latin calamus) in the dialect of Normandy, corresponding with the chalumeau of literary French; for when the early colonists in Canada saw the Indians performing the strange operation of smoking, 'with a hollow piece of stone or wood like a pipe,' as Jacques Cartier has it, they merely gave to the native tobacco-pipe the name of the French musical instrument it resembled. Now changes of sound and of sense like this of the English word pipe must have been in continual operation in hundreds of languages where we have no evidence to follow them by, and where we probably may never obtain such evidence. But what little we do know must compel us to do justice to the imitation of sound as a really existing process, capable of furnishing an indefinitely large supply of words for things and actions which have no necessary connexion at all with that sound. Where the traces of the transfer are lost, the result is a stock of words which are the despair of philologists, but are perhaps none the less fitted for the practical use of men who simply want recognized symbols for recognized ideas.
The claim of the Eastern tomtom to have its name from a mere imitation of its sound seems an indisputable one; but when it is noticed in what various languages the beating of a resounding object is expressed by something like tum, tumb, tump, tup, as in Javan tumbuk, Coptic tmno, 'to pound in a mortar,' it becomes evident that the admission involves more than at first sight appears. In Malay, timpa, tampa, is 'to beat out, hammer, forge;' in the Chinook Jargon tum-tum is 'the heart,' and by combining the same sound
