NAilVE POTTERY. 307 



large vessel rilled with water. The infusion yields a yellow- 

 ish liquor, which tastes like milk of almonds. Sometimes 

 papelon (unrefined sugar) is added. The missionary told us 

 that the natives become visibly fatter during the two or three 

 months in which they drink this seje, into which they dip 

 their cakes of cassava. The piaches, or Indian jugglers, go 

 into the forests, and sound the botuto (the sacred trumpet) 

 under the seje palm-trees, " to force the tree," they say, " to 

 yield an ample produce the following year." The people 

 pay for this operation, as the Mongols, the Arabs, and 

 nations still nearer to us, pay the cJiamans, the marabouts, 

 and other classes of priests, to drive away the white ants 

 and the locusts by mystic words or prayers, or to procure 

 a cessation of continued rain, and invert the order of the 

 seasons. 



"I have a manufacture of pottery in my village," said 

 Father Zea, when accompanying us on a visit to an Indian 

 family, who were occupied in baking, by a fire of brush wood, 

 in the open air, large earthen vessels, two feet and a halt* 

 high. This branch of manufacture is peculiar to the various 

 tribes of the great family of Maypures, and they appear to 

 have followed it from time immemorial. In every part of 

 the forests, far from any human habitation, on digging the 

 earth, fragments of pottery and delf are found. The taste 

 for this kind of manufacture seems to have been common 

 heretofore to the natives of both North and South America. 

 To the north of Mexico, on the banks of the Rio Gila, 

 among the ruins of an Aztec city ; in the United States, 

 near the tumuli of the Miamis ; in Florida, and in every place 

 where any traces of ancient civilization are found, the soil 

 covers fragments of painted pottery ; and the extreme resem- 

 blance of the ornaments they display is striking. Savage 

 nations, and those civilized people* who are condemned by 

 their political and religious institutions always to imitate 

 themselves, strive, as if by instinct, to perpetuate the same 

 forms, to preserve a peculiar type or style, and to follow the 

 methods and processes which were employed by their ances- 

 tors. In North America, fragments of delf ware have been 



The Hindoos, the Tibetians, the Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, tLe 

 Aztecs, lihe Peruvians ; with whom the tendency toward civilization iu i 

 body has prevented the free development of the facvlties of individual). 



x 2 



