19. The First Potter

Collective humanity owes a great debt of gratitude to the first potter.
Before his days the art of boiling, though in one sense very simple and
primitive indeed, was in another sense very complex, cumbersome, and
lengthy. The unsophisticated savage, having duly speared and killed his
antelope, proceeded to light a roaring fire, with flint or drill, by the
side of some convenient lake or river in his tropical jungle. Then he
dug a big hole in the soft mud close to the water's edge, and let the
water (rather muddy) percolate into it, or sometimes even he plastered
over its bottom with puddled clay. After that, he heated some smooth
round stones red hot in the fire close by, and drawing them out gingerly
between two pieces of stick, dropped them one by one, spluttering and
fizzing, into his improvised basin or kettle. This, of course, made the
water in the hole boil; and the unsophisticated savage thereupon thrust
into it his joint of antelope, repeating the process over and over again
until the sodden meat was completely seethed to taste on the outside. If
one application was not sufficient, he gnawed off the cooked meat from
the surface with his stout teeth, innocent as yet of the dentist's art,
and plunged the underdone core back again, till it exactly suited his
not over-delicate or dainty fancy.

To be sure, the primitive savage, unversed as he was in pastes and
glazes, in moulds and ornaments, did not pass his life entirely devoid
of cups and platters. Coconut shell and calabash rind, horn of ox and
skull of enemy, bamboo-joint and capacious rhomb-shell, all alike, no
doubt, supplied him with congenial implements for drink or storage. Like
Eve in the Miltonic Paradise, there lacked him not fit vessels pure;
picking some luscious tropical fruit, the savoury pulp he chewed, and in
the rind still as he thirsted scooped the brimming stream. This was
satisfactory as far as it went, of course, but it was not pottery. He
couldn't boil his joint for dinner in coco-nut or skull; he had to do it
with stone pot-boilers, in a rude kettle of puddled clay.

But at last one day, that inspired barbarian, the first potter, hit by
accident upon his grand discovery. He had carried some water in a big
calabash--the hard shell of a tropical fruit whose pulpy centre can be
easily scooped out--and a happy thought suddenly struck him: why not put
the calabash to boil upon the fire with a little clay smeared outside
it? The savage is conservative, but he loves to save trouble. He tried
the experiment, and it succeeded admirably. The water boiled, and the
calabash was not burnt or broken. Our nameless philosopher took the
primitive vessel off the fire with a forked branch and looked at it
critically with the delighted eyes of a