Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/333

Rh to have formed the earliest natural objects employed as vessels by primitive humanity. But of all these the gourd, by its singular variety of shape, best lent itself to the greatest and most varied uses. Besides the common double-bulging form, constricted in the middle, with the little bulb above and the big one below, so frequent as a water-bottle, you can get gourds in an immense number of other types, globular, compressed, bowl-like, or flask shaped. A Corsican model, which lies before me this moment as I write, has a flattened circular form from back to front, the back being the side next the stalk, and the front the side where the corolla has fallen off, leaving a little umbilicus or knob to mark its place in the very center. This form is ingeniously turned by the Corsicans into a very neat sort of flask or bottle for the girdle by cutting holes in the narrow side and fastening two handles for suspension at a graceful point half-way between the mouth and the middle line of the circle. The pretty vessel thus obtained is the model on which thousands of exquisite vases have long been turned out in ancient Etruria and at modern Vallauris.

The commonest shape of all, however, is the Syrian gourd with a round bulb, ending toward the stalk in a long neck, and capable, when filled with wine or water, of standing securely on its own basis by means of the slight depression at the umbilicus. This is, indeed, the original parent from which almost all bottles, carafes, and decanters, all the world over, have ultimately descended. The terra-cotta forms used as water-bottles, with a round bulb and long neck, most closely resemble their original to the present day, as the Japanese vases of two or three bulbs, successively constricted and growing larger from top to bottom, most closely resemble the double-bulging variety.

The reason why gourds are so manifold in shape is twofold. It is partly because they are a naturally plastic species, constantly giving rise to various divergent forms, like their neighbors the cucumbers; which divergent forms have, of course, been seized upon and still further developed for his own use by gourd-using man. But it is partly, also, because gourds, while growing, can be made to assume almost any desired shape or curve by tying string or wire round their rind. Primitive man early discovered this simple method of manufacture. I have seen gourds which in this manner have been twisted into the semblance of powder horns or wallets, and others which have been induced to ring themselves round half a dozen times over till they look almost like beads on a necklace.

Early man, no doubt, used his gourd as a gourd alone. But as time went on he began at last, apparently, to employ it as a model for pottery also. In all probability his earliest lessons in the fictile art were purely accidental. It is a common trick with savages to