Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/280

270 stone-boiling, of which the history, so far as I have been able to make it out from evidence within my reach, has thus been sketched. Of vessels used for the higher kind of boiling, as commonly known to us, something may now be said.

It is not absolutely necessary that vessels of earthenware, metal, etc., should be used for this purpose. Potstone, lapis ollaris, has been used by the Esquimaux, and by various Old World peoples, to make vessels which will stand the fire. The Asiatic paunch-kettles have just been mentioned, and kettles of skins have been described among the Esquimaux, and even among the wild Irish and the inhabitants of the Hebrides, of whose way of life George Buchanan gives the following curious account:—"In food, clothing, and all domestic matters, they use the ancient parsimony. Their meat is supplied by hunting and fishing. The flesh they boil with water in the paunch or hide of the slaughtered beast; out hunting they sometimes eat it raw, when the blood has been pressed out. For drink they have the broth of the meat. Whey that has been kept for years, they also drink greedily at their feasts. This kind of liquor they call bland." Beside these animal materials, parts of several plants will answer the purpose, as the bark used for kettles in Asia and America, the spathes of palms, in which food is often boiled in South America, the split bamboos in which the Dayaks, the Sumatrans, and the Stiêns of Cambodia, boil their rice, and cocoa-nut shells, as just mentioned in the Radack group; Captain Cook saw a cocoa-nut shell used in Tahiti, to dry up the blood of a native dog in, over the fire. These facts should be borne in mind in considering the following theory of the Origin of the Art of Pottery.

It was, I believe, Goguet who first propounded, in the last century, the notion that the way in which pottery came to be