INGENUITY AND LUXURY 



rial from which they could make all manner of useful 

 things that would be as enduring as rock itself. So 

 enduring, indeed, that these crude products of the 

 first potters, together with their fossil remains, form 

 the most important records of prehistoric man. 



Obviously, primitive man must have learned the 

 use of fire before he learned to make fire-baked pot- 

 tery; and it is more than probable that it was some 

 accident with the "untamed element" that taught 

 him how its very fury could be thus turned to account. 

 A conflagration that destroyed his home may have 

 converted the clay-daubed walls of his hut, which could 

 hardly hope to endure the first prolonged rainstorm, 

 into a stony substance all but indestructible. Or in 

 raking the ashes of his burned home in the hope of 

 finding some cherished article that had escaped de- 

 struction by the conflagration, he may have found that 

 his crude clay dishes, far from being destroyed by the 

 fire, had been transformed into a new and infinitely more 

 useful material, while still retaining their original shapes. 

 Some such hint would be sure to come sooner or later 

 to every race of people living in a tropical or temperate 

 zone; and it would follow inevitably that this hint 

 would be taken advantage of, and the art of pottery- 

 making discovered. 



In point of fact, practically all the primitive races 

 are familiar with some kind of pottery-making. The 

 peculiarly low-type savages of Australia have never 

 learned it, nor have the natives of Greenland and other 

 arctic regions; but the reason for this ignorance on the 

 part of the arctic dwellers is explained by climatic con- 



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