19. The First Potter - Page 2

first inventor. A wonderful
change had suddenly come over it. He had blundered accidentally upon the
art of pottery. For what is this that has happened to the clay? It went
in soft, brown, and muddy; it has come out hard, red, and stone-like.
The first potter ruminated and wondered. He didn't fully realise, no
doubt, what he had actually done; but he knew he had invented a means by
which you could put a calabash upon a fire and keep it there without
burning or bursting. That, after all, was at least something.

All this, you say (which, in effect, is Dr. Tylor's view), is purely
hypothetical. In one sense, yes; but not in another. We know that most
savage races still use natural vessels, made of coco-nuts, gourds, or
calabashes, for everyday purposes of carrying water; and we also know
that all the simplest and earliest pottery is moulded on the shape of
just such natural jars and bottles. The fact and the theory based on it
are no novelties. Early in the sixteenth century, indeed, the Sieur
Gonneville, skipper of Honfleur, sailing round the Cape of Good Hope,
made his way right across the Southern Ocean to some vague point of
South America where he found the people still just in the intermediate
stage between the use of natural vessels and the invention of pottery.
For these amiable savages (name and habitat unknown) had wooden pots
'plastered with a kind of clay a good finger thick, which prevents the
fire from burning them.' Here we catch industrial evolution in the very
act, and the potter's art in its first infancy, fossilised and
crystallised, as it were, in an embryo condition, and fixed for us
immovably by the unprogressive conservatism of a savage tribe. It was
this curious early observation of evolving keramic art that made
Goguet--an anthropologist born out of due season--first hit upon that
luminous theory of the origin of pottery now all but universally
accepted.

Plenty of evidence to the same effect is now forthcoming for the modern
inquirer. Among the ancient monuments of the Mississippi valley, Squier
and Davis found the kilns in which the primitive pottery had been baked;
and among their relics were partially burnt pots retaining in part the
rinds of the gourds or calabashes on which they had been actually
modelled. Along the Gulf of Mexico gourds were also used to give shape
to the pot; and all over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is
a very common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, dimly
and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile ware generally
came to be invented. In Fiji and in many parts of Africa vessels
modelled upon natural forms are still universal. Of course all such pots
as these are purely hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel,