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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shaped on the outer edge, and a most excellent device for cutting 

 skin without marring the hair. Scissors would be useless in this 

 connection, for they would shear the hair as well as the hide and 

 make an ugly seam. In the fitting of garments these primitive 



tailors anticipated the long list of 

 terms, such as puckering, gather- 

 ing, inserting gores, and the like. 

 For tucks in their more beautiful 

 dresses they inserted band after 

 band of the skins of different ani- 

 mals, bits from different parts of 

 the same hide, and strips of bare 

 hide ornamented by quill-work. 

 Tufts of feathers or long hair, pen- 

 dants of shell, hoof, teeth, or bone 

 in short, all objects of comely 

 shape and pretty color and proper 

 size were gathered into the cos- 

 tumes of men and children as well 

 as into their own." The reticule, 

 the tobacco bag, the traveling case, 

 the bandbox, and the packing trunk 

 all exist among savages, and in 

 North America were made by 

 women, chiefly from the hides of 

 animals. 



The potter's art may be seen in 

 its pristine simplicity in the soap- 

 stone or earthen lamp and stove of 

 the Eskimo, and in the arid regions 

 of New Mexico and Arizona, as 

 well as in South America, Africa, and New Guinea; and it is 

 woman that carries it on. " In the Southwestern States of our 

 Union women have, from time immemorial, practiced the art of 

 pottery with the greatest success. There is no reason to believe 

 that their present methods and tools and products are different at 

 all from what they were a thousand years ago. . . . The women 

 go forth to the mesa, where the proper layers of clay are exposed, 

 and quarry the raw material. To do this, one would say they 

 ought to be good mineralogists and skillful engineers. They also 

 gather from the sediment of the streams most excellent clay for 

 their paste." If the potter-woman does not find this excellent 

 paste, she gathers and carries home on her back the clay quarried 

 from the mesa; and in doing this she becomes a pack- woman. 

 She washes the clay, lets the gravel and worthless material sink 

 or float, decants the liquid, and allows the fine aluminous earth to 



Fig. 8. California Cradle Frame. 

 (After Mason.) 



