FIRE AS AN AGENT IN HUMAN CULTURE 



15 



The application of fire to bodily wants, expressed in warming the 

 body or parts of the body and the house, falls into the classes indi- 

 vidual, family, and collective, as follows: 



BEATING 



Application of fire to bodily wants 



Warming the body and house < 



As a preliminary remark, the use of fire extemporaneously for 

 warming presents many instances regarded as unusual and not fall- 

 ing in line with established customs or presenting features of devel- 

 opment from anterior sources. One of these curiosities in the use of 

 fire was told the writer in 1900 by Dr. Edward Palmer, who said 

 that the Cocopa Indians on the road in winter build a fire on the 

 sand for the purpose of heating it. When the sand is heated they 

 dig a hole beneath the place where the first was set, crawl in the hole 

 and, drawing back the warm sand over themselves, sleep comfortably 

 during the night. 



Another instance, somewhat less ingenious, is given by Rockhill: 

 "We passed several Mongol shepherds carrying about on the end of 

 a stick a smouldering bit of dry dung. Now and then they used it 

 to hght a bunch of grass and warm themselves by the blaze. "*^ 



In the line of development the fireplace comes before the usages 

 in wliich small portions of fire were inclosed in various ways for 

 special piu*poses. This specialization of uses of fire has grown enor- 

 mously from small beginnings, and furnishes an interesting group of 

 objects reflecting various periods and customs. 



Standing first in simphcity in applying heat to the body or parts 

 of the body are the methods taking advantage of the retention of 

 heat by various substances. One of the curiosities of the Tradescant 

 Museum, an institution founded in the seventeenth century and pro- 

 genitor of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, was "a brazen ball to 

 warme ye nunnes hands," as the old catalogue quaintly phrases it. 

 If this brazen ball was solid metal and not a hot-water container it 

 is in advance of the often extemporaneous stones, hot bricks, and flat 

 irons, which no doubt have had long use and which probably will never 



" W. W. Rockhill. Journey Through Mongolia and Tibet, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 

 1894, p. 35. 



