Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/335

Rh hand, owes its shape rather to the gourd or calabash cut in two transversely, and used as an open receptacle for liquids and powders. Of such bowls I have one or two excellent savage specimens. To this type may at last be traced, I believe, the tea-cup, the coffee-cup, the mug, and perhaps also the tumbler.

I may add that, in simple and early types of pottery, the ornamentation is always based on the natural forms suggested by the first or other primitive model. The decorations were first copied, I believe, from the ornamentation carved or worked on the natural form, except where they arose from the marks of thongs or other suspenders used in the firing. Now, in the gourd we have, so to speak, three natural elements of ornamentation to which all decorative adjuncts, if any, must necessarily adapt themselves: First, there is the stalk cut off to form the mouth in my first and third types, but retained as a central scar or knob, the main focus of the whole, in the second or diotic form so common in Corsica; secondly, there is what I have ventured here to call the umbilicus—the mark left by the faded calyx and corolla in the center of the fruit, retained as a central point of the vessel in all three forms; and, thirdly, there are the lines in the grain of the gourd which radiate like meridians from either pole, running from the stem-scar right round the equator to the umbilicus. Whoever tries to decorate a real gourd, either by carving or painting, will find himself practically compelled to fall in with the natural lines thus inevitably laid down for him; he must obey the laws of his prime material. All gourds actually decorated, however rudely, in simple and naïve societies are so adorned. Hence, in the first and third forms, the decoration runs up and down the sides of the bottle, or in transverse bars and longitudinal lines; while in the second or flat, circular vase type it runs always in concentric rings round a point in the middle.

Now, this pretty Kabyle ware, which formed the original text for my present sermon, is pottery of a very antique and naive type—the last relic, in fact, of ancient Phoenician art. The Phoenicians brought these ideas with them to Carthage, and the Crathaginians diffused them among the aboriginal mountaineers of the Atlas range, whose lineal descendants are the Kabyles of the Djurjura in our own day. That simple ware, with its yellow groundwork and its dichromatic ornamentation in russet-brown and black (the one ochre, the other peroxide of manganese), has been manufactured ever since in the uplands of the Atlas by the Moslemized grandsons of the Christianized Mauritanians. In tone and color it recalls somewhat the earliest Greek and Etruscan vases: but the law of Islam, of course, prevents the introduction of human or animal figures, so the ornamentation now consists entirely of geometrical and arabesque designs, accommodated to