GOURDS AND BOTTLES, 321 



hand, owes its shape rather to the gourd or calabash cut in two 

 transversely, and used as an open receptacle for liquids and pow- 

 ders. Of such bowls I have one or two excellent savage specimens. 

 To this type may at last be traced, I believe, the tea-cup, the 

 coffee-cup, the mug, and perhaps also the tumbler. 



I may add that, in simple and early types of pottery, the orna- 

 mentation is always based on the natural forms suggested by the 

 first or other primitive model. The decorations were first copied, 

 I believe, from the ornamentation carved or worked on the nat- 

 ural form, except where they arose from the marks of thongs or 

 other suspenders used in the firing. Now, in the gourd we have, so 

 to speak, three natural elements of ornamentation to which all 

 decorative adjuncts, if any, must necessarily adapt themselves: 

 First, there is the stalk cut off to form the mouth in my first and 

 third types, but retained as a central scar or knob, the main focus 

 of the whole, in the second or diotic form so common in Corsica ; 

 secondly, there is what I have ventured here to call the umbilicus 

 — the mark left by the faded calyx and corolla in the center of the 

 fruit, retained as a central point of the vessel in all three forms ; 

 and, thirdly, there are the lines in the grain of the gourd which 

 radiate like meridians from either pole, running from the stem- 

 scar right round the equator to the umbilicus. Whoever tries to 

 decorate a real gourd, either by carving or painting, will find him- 

 self practically compelled to fall in with the natural lines thus 

 inevitably laid down for him ; he must obey the laws of his prime 

 material. All gourds actually decorated, however rudely, in simple 

 and naive societies are so adorned. Hence, in the first and third 

 forms, the decoration runs up and down the sides of the bottle, or 

 in transverse bars and longitudinal lines ; while in the second or 

 fl.at, circular vase type it runs always in concentric rings round a 

 point in the middle. 



Now, this pretty Kabyle ware, which formed the original text 

 for my present sermon, is pottery of a very antique and naive 

 type — the last relic, in fact, of ancient Phoenician art. The Phoe- 

 nicians brought these ideas with them to Carthage, and the Cra- 

 thaginians diffused them among the aboriginal mountaineers of 

 the Atlas range, whose lineal descendants are the Kabyles of 

 the Djurjura in our own day. That simple ware, with its yellow 

 groundwork and its dichromatic ornamentation in russet-brown 

 and black (the one ochre, the other peroxide of manganese), has 

 been manufactured ever since in the uplands of the Atlas by the 

 Moslemized grandsons of the Christianized Mauritanians. In tone 

 and color it recalls somewhat the earliest Greek and Etruscan 

 vases : but the law of Islam, of course, prevents the introduction 

 of human or animal figures, so the ornamentation now consists 

 entirely of geometrical and arabesque designs, accommodated to 



VOL. XXXIII. — 21 



