THE FIRST POTTER 321 



doubtless been duly boiled, a hundred thousand years ago, 

 by the intelligent producer of those identical sun-dried 

 fleshpots ; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his possession 

 portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel, 

 from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of 

 the hand that moulded the clay are still clearly dis- 

 tinguishable on the baked earthenware. That is the great 

 merit of pottery, viewed as an historical document ; it 

 retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through 

 countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn 

 antiquaries. Litera scripta manet, and so does baked 

 pottery. The hand itself that formed that rude bowl has 

 long since mouldered away, flesh and bone alike, into the 

 soil around it ; but the print of its fingers, indelibly fixed 

 by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell 

 the story of that early triumph of nascent keramics. 



The relics of palaeolithic pottery are, however, so very 

 fragmentary, and the circumstances under which they 

 have been discovered so extremely doubtful, that many 

 cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now have 

 nothing to say to the suspected impostors. Among the 

 remains of the newer Stone Age, on the other hand, com- 

 paratively abundant keramic specimens have been un- 

 earthed, without doubt or cavil, from the long barrows 

 the burial-places of the early Mongoloid race, now re- 

 presented by the Finns and Lapps, which occupied the 

 whole of Western Europe before the advent of the Aryan 

 vanguard. One of the best bits is a curious wide-mouthed, 

 semi-globular bowl from Norton Bavant, in Wiltshire, 

 whose singular shape suggests almost immediately the 

 idea that it must at least have been based, if not actually 

 modelled, upon a human skull. Its rim is rough and quite 

 irregular, and there is no trace of ornamentation of any 

 sort ; a fact quite in accordance with all the other facts we 



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