Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/273

Rh speaks of having "a Barbacue of split Bambooes to sleep on." The American mode of roasting on such a framework is the origin of our term to barbecue, though its meaning has changed to that of roasting an animal whole. The art of bucaning or barbecuing, as practised by the Americans, is found in Africa, in Kamchatka, the Eastern Archipelago, and the Pelew Islands; and it merges into the very common process of smoking meat to make it keep.

The mere inspection of these simple and wide-spread varieties of cooking gives the ethnographer very little evidence of the way in which they have been invented and spread over the world. But from the more complex art of Boiling there is something to be learnt. There are races of mankind, such as the Fuegians and the Bushmen, who do not seem to have known how to boil food when they first came into the view of Europe, while the higher peoples of the world, and a great proportion of the lower ones, have had, so long as we know anything of them, vessels of pottery or metal which they put liquids into, and set over the fire to boil. Between these two conditions, however, there lies a process which has been superseded by the higher method within modern times over a large fraction of the earth's surface, and which there is some reason to believe once extended much further. It is even likely that the art of Boiling, as commonly known to us, may have been developed through this intermediate process, which I propose to call Stone-Boiling.

There is a North American tribe who received from their neighbours the Ojibwas, the name of Assinaboins, or "Stone- Boilers," from their mode of boiling their meat, of which Catlin gives a particular account. They dig a hole in the ground, take a piece of the animal's raw hide, and press it down with their hands close to the sides of the hole, which thus becomes a sort of pot or basin. This they fill with water, and they make a number of stones red-hot in a fire close by. The meat is put into the water, and the stones dropped in till the meat is boiled. Catlin describes the process as awkward and tedious, and says