Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/96

 mason] ABORIGINAL AMERICAN ZOOTECUNY 77

and enjoyment. Every part of every animal that enters into savage industry is invoked to supply, as just shown, not only the needs, but the artificial wants of the savage.

. Looking at a modern house, it is easy to see that it is divided into cellars or storage places, kitchens or cooking places, dining- rooms or eating places, parlors or places for social intercourse, and bedrooms or places for rest. Though these do not exist in differentiated form among savages, in every tribe of North Amer- ica, however rude, there was something answering to them. The great variety of food called for an equally great variety of cook- ing, and so the fireplace and its surroundings, with reference to animal food, gave rise to a multitude of arts. In one place, it is roasting; in another, cooking with hot stones; in the third, in pits; in the fourth, by means of pottery, and so on through the list. The serving of food calls for eating and drinking utensils of horn, shell, hide, and bone. The Eskimo makes a dipper from the tusk of a fossil elephant ; the Haida, from the horn of the Rocky Mountain sheep, the handle of which is from the horn of the goat; the buffalo horn served well the Indians of the plains; the clam shell, the eastern tribes ; the turtle shell, the western tribes; the conch shell, the middle American tribes. In large areas of the western hemisphere no pottery exists, and some por- tions of the animal frame take the place of vessels made from that material elsewhere.

The furniture of the social room and the bedroom are made from animal integuments. The Eskimo crawls into his sleeping- bag of fur ; the west-coast man wraps himself in his blanket of mountain-goat hair; the plains Indian could not live without his buffalo robe ; the eastern Indian lay down in his bear skin.

In southwestern United States everywhere the babe was en- folded in a robe of rabbit skin, and even in those parts of South America where the climate requires no clothing the Indian ap- pears decorated with beautiful cinctures of feathers and wearing hats and collars of animal teeth. Finally, at the extreme south-

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