Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/334

320 put water to warm on the camp-fire in a calabash or gourd with wet clay smeared over the bottom to keep it from burning. Wherever the clay thus employed was fine enough to form a mold and bake hard in shape, it would cling to the gourd, and be used time and again in the same way without renewal, till at last it came to be regarded almost as a component part of the compound vessel. Traces of this stage in the evolution of pottery still exist in various outlying corners of the world. Savages have been noted who smear their dishes with clay; and bowls may be found in various museums which still contain more or less intact the relics of the natural object on which they were modeled. In one case the thing imbedded in the clay bowl is a human skull, presumably an enemy's.

In most cases, however, the inner gourd or calabash, in proportion as it was well coated up to the very top with a good protective layer of clay, would tend to get burned out by the heat of the fire in the course of time; until at last the idea would arise that the natural form was nothing more than a mere mold or model, and that the earthenware dish which grew up around it was the substantive vessel. As soon as this stage of pot-making was arrived at, the process of firing would become deliberate, instead of accidental, and the vessel would only be considered complete as soon as it had been subjected to a great heat which would effectually burn out the gourd or calabash imbedded in the center. But the close similarity of early fictile forms all the world over, and their obvious likeness to the same simple, natural types, combine to show us that the art of pottery had everywhere the same easy origin, and that it was everywhere based on the same primitive unmanufactured vessels.

Three main forms of pottery, and later of glass-ware, may be safely held to take their origin from the bottle-gourd alone. The first is the double or treble-bulbed vase, so common a type in Japanese and Oriental pottery. This is the most distinctively gourd-like of all, and it has given rise indirectly to endless variations. The second is the flat, circular vase with two lateral handles—the diota—always showing in early specimens its gourd origin by the nature of its ornamentation, which radiates (as is well exhibited by some of my Morocco specimens) from the umbilicus or calyx-scar in the center of the fruit. The third is the clay water-bottle or carafe, with round bulb below and tall neck above, which gives rise in turn to the vast majority of modern vases, vessels, and bottles. Even the common beer-bottle, with the "kink" or "kirck" at the bottom, affiliates itself ultimately upon this last-named form, being derived in the last resort from those long-necked gourds which could stand firmly on their own basis, owing to a slight re-entrant depression about the umbilicus. The bowl or basin, on the other