POTTERY AFFECTED BY ENVIRONMENT. 



483 



as a vessel, and called shop torn me, it must have been named after an 

 older form of vessel, instead of after the plant or fruit which produced it. 

 While the gourd was large and convenient in form, it was difficult of 

 transportation owing to its fragility. To overcome this it was encased 

 in a coarse sort of wicker-work, composed of fibrous yucca leaves or 

 of flexible splints. Of this we have evidence in a series of gourd-ves 

 sels among the Zunis, into which the sacred water is said to have been 

 transferred from the tubes, and a pair of which one of the priests, who 

 came east with me two years ago, brought from New Mexico to Boston 

 in his hands — so precious were they considered as relics — for the pur- 

 pose of replenishing them with water from the Atlantic. These ves- 

 sels are encased rudely but strongly in a meshing of splints (see Fig. 

 500), and while I do not positively claim that they have been piously 



Fig. 50". — Gourd vessel enclosed in wicker. 



preserved since the time of the universal use of gourds as water-ves- 

 sels by the ancestry of this people, they are nevertheless of consider- 

 able antiquity. Their origin is attributed to the priest-gods, and they 

 show that it must have once been a common practice to encase gourds, 

 as above described, in osiery. 



POTTERY ANTICIPATED BY BASKETRY. 



This crude beginning of the wicker-art in connection with water-ves- 

 sels points toward the development of the wonderful water-tight bas- 

 ketry of the southwest, explaining, too, the resemblance of many of its 

 typical forms to the shapes of gourd-vessels. Were we uncertain of 



