THE FIRST POTTEK 319 



ware generally came to be invented. In Fiji and in many 

 parts of Africa vessels modelled upon natural forms are 

 still universal. Of course all such pots as these are purely 

 hand-made ; the invention of the potter's wheel, now so 

 indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production 

 of earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost 

 modern period. 



And that consideration naturally suggests the funda- 

 mental question, When did the first potter live ? The 

 world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly told us) knows 

 nothing of its greatest men ; and the very name of the 

 father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse 

 of ages. Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one 

 may reasonably doubt whether there was ever actually any 

 one single man on whom one could definitely lay one's 

 finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the first 

 potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by 

 imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary 

 beginnings. Just as there were steam-engines before Watt, 

 and locomotives before Stephenson, so there were pots before 

 the first potter. Many men must have discovered separately, 

 by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of mud rudely 

 plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from 

 catching fire and spilling its contents ; other men slowly 

 learned to plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the 

 sides ; and yet others gradually introduced and patented 

 new improvements for wholly encasing the entire cup in an 

 inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay. Bit by bit the 

 invention grew, like all great inventions, without any in- 

 ventor. Thus the question of the date of the first potter 

 practically resolves itself into the simpler question of the 

 date of the earliest known pottery. 



Did palaeolithic man, that antique naked crouching 

 savage who hunted the mammoth, the reindeer, and the 



