322 THE FIRST POTTER 



know about the men of the newer Stone Ago, who were 

 far less artistic and testhetic in every way than their ruder 

 predecessors of the interghicial epoch. 



Ornamentation, when it does begin to appear, arises at 

 first in a strictly practical and unintentional manner. 

 Later examples elsewhere show us by analogy how it first 

 came into existence. The Indians of the Ohio seem to 

 have modelled their pottery in bags or nettings made of 

 coarse thread or twinted bark. Those of the Mississippi 

 moulded them in baskets of willow or splints. When the 

 moist clay thus shaped and marked by the indentations of 

 the mould was baked in the kiln, it of course retained the 

 pretty dappling it received from the interlaced and Avoven 

 thrums, which were burnt off in the process of firing. 

 Thus a rude sort of natural diaper ornament was set up, 

 to which the eye soon became accustomed, and which it 

 learned to regard as necessary for beauty. Hence, wherever 

 newer and more improved methods of modelling came into 

 use, there would arise an instinctive tendency on the part 

 of the early potter to imitate the familiar marking by arti- 

 ficial means. Dr. Klemm long ago pointed out that the 

 oldest German fictile vases have an ornamentation in which 

 plaiting is imitated by incised lines. ' What was no longer 

 wanted as a necessity,' he says, 'was kept up as an orna- 

 ment alone.' 



Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing 

 everywhere all the world over on primitive bowls and vases, 

 is the rope pattern, a line or string-course over the whole 

 surface or near the mouth of the vessel. Many of the 

 indented patterns on early British pottery have been pro- 

 duced, as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close 

 impress of twisted cord on the wet clay. Sometimes these 

 cords seem to have been originally left on the clay in the 

 process of baking, and used as a mould ; at other times 



