320 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



put water to warm on the camp-fire in a calabash or gourd with 

 wet clay smeared over the bottom to keep it from burning. 

 Wherever the clay thus employed was fine enough to form a 

 mold and bake hard in shape, it would cling to the gourd, and be 

 used time and again in the same way without renewal, till at last 

 it came to be regarded almost as a component part of the com- 

 pound vessel. Traces of this stage in the evolution of pottery 

 still exist in various outlying corners of the world. Savages have 

 been noted who smear their dishes with clay ; and bowls may be 

 found in various museums which still contain more or less intact 

 the relics of the natural object on which they were modeled. In 

 one case the thing imbedded in the clay bowl is a human skull, 

 presumably an enemy's. 



In most cases, however, the inner gourd or calabash, in pro- 

 portion as it was well coated up to the very top with a good pro- 

 tective layer of clay, would tend to get burned out by the heat of 

 the fire in the course of time ; until at last the idea would arise 

 that the natural form was nothing more than a mere mold or 

 model, and that the earthenware dish which grew up around it 

 was the substantive vessel. As soon as this stage of pot-making 

 was arrived at, the process of firing would become deliberate, in- 

 stead of accidental, and the vessel would only be considered com- 

 plete as soon as it had been subjected to a great heat which would 

 effectually burn out the gourd or calabash imbedded in the center. 

 But the close similarity of early fictile forms all the world over, 

 and their obvious likeness to the same simple, natural types, com- 

 bine to show us that the art of pottery had everywhere the same 

 easy origin, and that it was everywhere based on the same primi- 

 tive unmanufactured vessels. 



Three main forms of pottery, and later of glass-ware, may be 

 safely held to take their origin from the bottle-gourd alone. The 

 first is the double or treble-bulbed vase, so common a type in Japa- 

 nese and Oriental pottery. This is the most distinctively gourd-like 

 of all, and it has given rise indirectly to endless variations. The 

 second is the flat, circular vase with two lateral handles — the 

 diota — always showing in early specimens its gourd origin by the 

 nature of its ornamentation, which radiates (as is well exhibited by 

 some of my Morocco specimens) from the umbilicus or calyx-scar in 

 the center of the fruit. The third is the clay water-bottle or carafe, 

 with round bulb below and tall neck above, which gives rise in 

 turn to the vast majority of modern vases, vessels, and bottles. 

 Even the common beer-bottle, with the " kink " or " kirck " at the 

 bottom, affiliates itself ultimately upon this last-named form, being 

 derived in the last resort from those long-necked gourds which 

 could stand firmly on their own basis, owing to a slight re-entrant 

 depression about the umbilicus. The bowl or basin, on the other 



