318 THE FIRST POTTER 



is purely hypothetical. In one sense, yes ; but not in 

 another. We know that most savage races still use natural 

 vessels, made of coconuts, gourds, or calabashes, for every- 

 day purposes of carrying water ; and we also know that all 

 the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of 

 just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory 

 based on it are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth cencury, 

 indeed, the Sieur Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing 

 round the Cape of Good Hope, made his way right across 

 the Southern Ocean to some vague point of South America 

 where he found the people still just in the intermediate 

 stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention 

 of pottery. For these amiable savages (name and habitat 

 unknown) had wooden pots ' plastered with a kind of clay 

 a good finger thick, which prevents the fire from burning 

 them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very act, 

 and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and 

 crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed 

 for us immovably by the tmprogressive conservatism of a 

 savage tribe. It was this curious early observation of evolv- 

 ing keramic art that made Goguet an anthropologist born 

 out of due season first hit upon that luminous theory of 

 the origin of pottery now all but universally accepted. 



Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcom- 

 ing for the modern inquirer. Among the ancient monu- 

 ments of the Mississippi valley, Squier and Davis found 

 the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked ; 

 and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining 

 in part the rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they 

 had been actually modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico 

 .gourds were also used to give shape to the pot ; and all 

 over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is a very 

 common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, 

 dimly and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile 



