FIRK, COOKING, AND VESSELS. 267 



Stone-boilers once occupied districts in Europe. In spite of 

 ages of contact with the Indo-European race, a branch of the 

 great Tatar family, the Finns, have kept up into modern times 

 a relic of the practice. Linnjeus, on his famous Lapland Tour, 

 in 1732, recorded the fact that in East Bothland "The Finnish 

 liquor called Lura is prepared like other beer, except not being 

 boiled, instead of which red-hot stones are thrown into it."^ 

 Moreover, the quantities of stones, evidently calcined, which 

 are found buried in our own country, sometimes in the sites of 

 ancient dwellings, give great probability to the inference which 

 has been drawn from them, that they were used in cooking. 

 It is true that their use may have been for baking in under- 

 ground ovens, a practice found among races who are Stone- 

 boilers, and others who are not. 



In Asia, I have met with no positive evidence of the ex- 

 istence of stone-boiling beyond Kamchatka, but some ex- 

 tremely rude boiling-vessels have been observed among Sibeiim 

 tribes, the use of which is either to be explained by the absence 

 or scarcity of earthenware or metal pots, or by the keeping up 

 of old habits belonging to a time of such absence or scarcity. 

 The Dutch envoy, Ysbrants Ides, remarks of the Ostyaks, " I 

 have also seen a copper kettle among them, and some other 

 kettles of bark sewed together, in which they can boil food 

 over the hot coals, but not in the flame of the fire."^ Now 

 just such bark-kettles as the'se have been seen in use amoug a 

 North American tribe on the Unijah, or Peace Eiver, near the 

 Rocky Mountains. They were stone-boilers, using for this 

 purpose the regular ivatape pots, or rather baskets, of woven 

 roots of spruce fir, but they had also kettles, " made of spruce- 

 bark, which they hang over the fire, but at such a distance as 

 to receive the heat without being within reach of the blaze ; 

 a very tedious operation."'^ In Siberia, among the Ostyaks, the 

 practice has been observed of using the paunch of the slaugh- 

 tered beast as a vessel to cook the blood in over the fire,* and 



' Linnseus, Tour, vol. ii. p. 231. 



2 E. Ysbrants Ides, ' Eeize naav China ;' Amsterdam, 1710, p. 27. 



3 Maolsenzie, p. 207. 



■< Erman (E. Tr.), vol. ii. pp. 456, 467. 



