ON TREE-TRUNK WATER-PIPES. 6l
untrimmed, having their bark on, and each about 8ft. in length.
In the centre of each log a circular channel had been bored, and
one end of each length was pointed so that it might fit into the
next without any escape of water at the junction. Mr. Wil-
loughby induced the foreman in charge to cut off the pointed end
of one of these pipes, and was also good enough to present the
portion removed to me.
To us of the Victorian, or iron age, water-pipes of this kind
naturally suggest a primitive time, such as that in which dug-out
canoes abounded in the British Isles. But for knowing that these
pipes were in use here when George III. was King, one might
be surprised to learn that among the remains of a Roman villa at
Fescote, Bucks., there was discovered, in 1840-3, a tank, contain-
ing a spring, "which ran through wooden trunks of trees to a
larger tank."(1) Or that evidence of their existence in the Roman
FIG. I.—SHAPE OF WOODEN WATER-PIPE.
Wigmore Street, 1901. Length about 8 feet.
(From a Sketch by Mr. Willoughby).
City at Silchester was discovered during the excavations in 1896.(2)
We learn also from Mr. W. H. St. John Hope, the recorder of
the excavations at Silchester, that "There does not seem to be
any record of such a discovery as this elsewhere in this country,
but one of precisely the same kind was made in France in 1772,
on the site of a Roman town at Chatelet, between St. Dizier and
Joinville in Champagne." This rarity is probably due mainly
to the comparative rapidity with which wooden pipes would tend
to perish, if close to the surface; while, if deeper, they would be
proportionately the more likely to escape the notice of the
explorer.
However, the interest attached to the discovery of primitive
water-pipes increases with the lateness, not the antiquity, of the
period to which they can be ascribed. Passing therefore over a
considerable interval of time, I learn from the History of London
(1) Gent. Mag. Library, Romano-British Remains. Part I., p. 8.
(2) Archaeologia. Second Series. Vol. V., pp. 422-3. (1897).