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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



no anxiety about the outside surface. Indeed, he had but one sur- 

 face to watch till he came to the incurve, if his vessel was to have 

 a narrow mouth. Then, I surmise, he built up roughly a clay mold, 

 well sanded, pressing what was left of his fabric into the inside of 

 this mold as he built his vessel upward. Frequently, doubtless, the 

 fabric was not sufficient to go to the top, which explains why some- 

 times only a part of a jar shows the cord markings. The jar com- 

 pleted, it was easy to pull away the upper mold shell of clay and by 

 means of the fabric lift the vessel out of the mold hole and remove 

 it to the drying spot, where the fabric was peeled off and handles 

 or other projecting parts added. The cord-markings are plainly 

 shown in Plate XXXIX, from Mr. Holmes's casts. 



The distorting and overlapping of the meshes observed by Mr. 

 Holmes were probably due to the gathering in to fit the interior of 

 the mold, for it must be borne in mind that the fabric was not 

 shaped in any way to fit the mold, but was doubtless a fragment of 

 some squarely woven article. Thus gathering and overlapping were 

 necessary to make it conform to the inside surface of the mold. 



When coarse basketry was used for a mold that was intended 

 to be removed before firing, the interstices of the basket work were 

 probably rubbed full of a mixture of sand 

 and clay to prevent the finished vessel from 

 sticking or catching, which 

 explains, I think, the pecul- 

 iarity of design in some cases, 

 for only the more prominent 

 features of the basket work 

 would impress the vessel. In 

 Mr. Holmes's fine paper on 

 this subject in the Third An- 

 nual Report of the United 

 States Bureau of Ethnology, 

 the illustrations Figs. 107, 

 108, 109, 111, and 112 

 present this peculiarity of de- 

 sign, due to the fact that the 

 chief members of the bas- 

 ketry were covered by the 

 sand-clay mixture. It seems 

 quite probable that to gain 

 stiffness these baskets may also have been put into a ground mold. 

 I have not been able to examine the interstices in the casts Mr. 

 Holmes so cleverly made, but a careful examination would probably 

 show evidences in favor of the mold-hole idea. The fabrics used, 



lmm 



Fig. 3. 



Fig. 4, 



