Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX.
FIRE, COOKING, AND VESSELS.
There are a number of stories, old and new, of tribes of man- kind living in ignorance of the art of fire-making. Such a state of things is indeed usually presupposed by the wide- spread legends of first fire-makers or fire-bringers, and Plutarch, in his essay on the question "Whether water or fire is the more useful?" gives a typical view of the matter. Fire was invented, as they say, by Prometheus, and our life shows that this was not a poetic fiction. For there are some races of men who live without fire, houseless, hearthless, and dwelling in the open air.[1] The modern point of view is, however, very different from Plutarch's, and when the mention of a fireless race appears in company with a Prometheus, mythology, not history, claims it. The mere assertion that in a certain place a race is, or was, to be found living without fire is more difficult to deal with. In examining a collection of such statements, it is well to pay particular attention to the modern ones, on which collateral evidence may be brought to bear.
What is known of the native civilization of the Canary Islands, the making of pottery, the cooking in underground ovens, the use of the fire-drill, leaves no doubt that the Guanches knew how to produce and use fire at the time of the European expeditions in the 14th and 15th centuries. Yet Antonio Galvano, writing his treatise about the middle of the sixteenth century, declares that "in times past they ate raw meat, for want of fire." Farther on in the same book he has another story of a fireless people. In 1529, Alvaro de Saavedra, returning from the Moluccas toward the Pacific coast of Mexico, sailed eastward along the north coast of New Guinea, and having gone four or five degrees south of the Line, crossed again to the north, and discovered an island of tattooed people, which he called Isla de los Pintados, or the isle of painted men. Beyond this island, in 10° or 12° N., they found many small smooth ones together, full of palms and grass, and these they called Los Jardines, "The Gardens." The natives had no domestic animals, they were dressed in a white cloth of grass, ate coco-nuts for bread, and raw fish, which they took in the praus which they made out of drift pine-wood with their tools of shell. They stood in terror of fire, for they had never seen it (espantaram se do fogo, porque nunca o virarn).[2] I am not aware that these islands have been identified, but they would seem to be somewhere about the Radack or Chatham group. The account of the natives, to judge by its general consistency with what is known of the common eating of raw vegetables and fish in other coral islands in the Pacific, seems to have come mostly or altogether from an eye-witness, and the statement that they had no fire is not to be summarily set down as a mere fiction, like that about the Canary Islands. It has fortunately happened, however, that a very similar story has come up in our own time about another coral island, under circumstances which allow of its accuracy being tested. When the United States' Exploring Expedition, under Commodore Wilkes, visited Fakaafo or Bowditch Island in 1841, they made the following remarks:—"There was no sign of places for cooking, nor any appearance of fire, and it is believed that all their provisions are eaten raw. What strengthened this opinion, was the alarm the natives felt when they saw the sparks emanating from the flint and steel, and the emission of smoke from the mouths of those who were smoking cigars."[3]
Curiously enough, within the very work which contains these remarks, particulars are given which show that fire was in reality a familiar thing in the island. Mr. Hale, the ethnographer to the expedition, not only mentions the appearance of smoke on the neighbouring Duke of York's Island as being evidence of natives being there, but he gives the name for fire in the language of Fakaafo, afi,[4] a most widely-spread Malayo-Polynesian word, corresponding to the Malay form api. Some years later, the Rev. George Turner again mentions this word afi, and gives besides a native story about fire, which is an interesting example of the way in which a mere myth may nevertheless be a piece of historical evidence. The account which the inhabitants of Fakaafo give of the introduction of fire among themselves is thus related. "The origin of fire they trace to Mafuike, but, unlike the Mafuike of the mythology of some other islands, this was an old blind lady. Talangi went down to her in her lower regions, and asked her to give him some of her fire. She obstinately refused until he threatened to kill her, and then she yielded. With the fire he made her say what fish were to be cooked with it, and what were still to be eaten raw, and then began the time of cooking food." Utter myth as this story is, it yet joins with the evidence of language in bringing the history of the islanders who tell it into connexion with the history of the distant New Zealanders. It belongs to the great Polynesian myth of Maui, who, the New Zealand story says, went away to the dwelling of his great ancestress Mahuika, and got fire from her.[5] And it proves that, even in the past time when these two versions of the story branched off, one to be found in Fakaafo, and the other in New Zealand, not only was fire known, but its discovery had become already a thing of the forgotten past, or a myth would not have been applied to explain it.
In his account of the natives of Fakaafo, Mr. Turner speaks of their recollection of the time when they used fire in felling trees, and he mentions, moreover, some curious native ordinances respecting fire. "No fire is allowed to be kindled at night in the houses of the people all the year round. It is sacred to the god, and so, after sundown, they sit and chat in the dark. There are only two exceptions to the rule: first, fire to cook fish caught in the night, hut then it must not be taken to their houses, only to the cooking-house; and second, a light is allowed at night in a house where there happens to he a confinement."[6] It is likely that Wilkes may have misinterpreted the surprise of the natives at seeing cigars smoked, and fire produced from the flint and steel, as well as the eating of raw fish and the absence of signs of cooking in the dwellings. If the similar story of the islanders of Los Jardines really came from an eye-witness, it may have arisen in much the same way. In Kotzebue's time, the people of the Radack group (which may be perhaps the very Jardines in question) were just as much astonished at the smith's forge, though fire was a wellknown thing to them.[7]
The circumstances of Magalhaens' discovery of the Ladrones or Marian Islands, and the Philippines, in 1521, are known to us from the narrative of his companion Antonio Pigafetta,[8] who describes the manners and customs of the natives, but without a hint that fire was anything strange to them. This preposterous addition must be sought in later authors. In 1652, Horn, not content with quoting Galvano's stories of the Canaries and Los Jardines, adds the natives of the Philippines as a race destitute of fire.[9] But the story of the Ladrone Islanders is even more remarkable than this.
The arts of these people are described by Pigafetta with some detail. He mentions the slight clothing of bark worn by the women, the mats and baskets, the wooden houses, the canoes with outriggers, and he notices that the natives had no weapons but lances pointed with fish bones, and had no notion of what arrows were. They stole everything they could lay hands on, and at last Magalhaens went on shore with forty men, burnt forty or fifty of their houses, and killed seven of the people. A hundred and eighty years afterwards the Jesuit Father Le Gobien brought out a new feature in the story. "What is most astonishing, and what people will find it hard to believe, is that they had never seen fire. This so necessary element was entirely unknown to them. They neither knew its use nor its qualities; and they were never more surprised than when they saw it for the first time on the descent that Magellan made on one of their islands, where he burnt some fifty of their houses, to punish these islanders for the trouble they had given him. They at first regarded the fire as a kind of animal which attached itself to the wood on which it fed. The first who came too near it having burnt themselves frightened the rest, and only dared look at it from afar; for fear, they said, of being bitten by it, and lest this terrible animal should wound them by its violent breath," etc. etc. He goes on to tell how they soon got accustomed to it and learnt to use it.[10]
It is a curious illustration of the change in historical criticism that has come since 1700, that the Jesuit historian should have expected so singular a story, not mentioned by the eye-witness who described the discovery, to be received without the production of the slightest evidence, a hundred and eighty years after date, and that the public should have justified his confidence in their credulity by believing and quoting his account. Whether he took it directly from any other book or not I can- not tell; but it is to be observed, that if we add Galvano's story about Los Jardines to Pigafetta's mention of Magalhaens burning the houses of the Ladrone Islanders, we may account for the sources of all Father Le Gobien's story, except the idea of the fire being an animal, which may be supplied out of Herodotus. "By the Egyptians also it hath been held that fire is a living beast, and that it devours everything it can seize, and when filled with food it perishes with what it has devoured."[11]
There are stories of fireless men in America, to which I can only refer. Father Lafitau speaks indefinitely of there being such.[12] Father Lombard, of the Company of Jesus, writing in 1730 from Kourou, in French Guyana, gives an account of the tribe of Amikouanes on the river Oyapok, who are also called "long-eared Indians," their ears being stretched to their shoulders. This nation, he says, which has been hitherto unknown, is extremely savage; they have no knowledge of fire.[13]
It is a very curious thing that one of the oldest stories of a race of fireless men is also the newest. In Ethiopia, says the geographer Pomponius Mela, "there are people to whom fire was so totally unknown before the coming of Eudoxus, and so wondrously were they pleased with it when they saw it, that they had the greatest delight in embracing the flames and hiding burning things in their bosom till they were hurt."[14] Pliny places these fireless men in his catalogue of monstrous Ethiopian tribes, between the dumb men and the pygmies. To some, he says, the use of fire was unknown before the time of Ptolemy Lathyrus, king of Egypt.[15] His mention of the name of Ptolemy Lathyrus shows that he, too, is quoting the voyages of Eudoxus of Cyzicus. Whether there was such a person as Eudoxus, and whether he really made the voyages attributed to him or not, is not very clear; but his story, like that of Sindbad, embodies notions current at the time it was written. And with such tenacity does the popular mind hold on to old stories, that now, after a lapse of some two thousand years, the fireless men and the pygmies are brought by the modern Ethiopians into even closer contact than in the pages of Pliny. Dr. Krapf was told that the Dokos, men four feet high, living south of Kaffa and Susa, subsisted on roots and serpents, and were not acquainted with fire.[16] As far as the pygmies are concerned, there appears to be a foundation for the story, in a race of small men really living there. Krapf was shown a slave four feet high, who, they told him, was a Doko. But between four feet and three spans, the height assigned by Pliny to pygmy races elsewhere,[17] there is a difference. Nor is this the only instance of the wonderful permanence of old stories in this part of the world, quite irrespectively of their being true. Within no great distance, an old negro gave Mr. Petherick an account of the monstrous men he had met with on his travels, the men with four eyes, the men with eyes under their arm-pits, the men with long tails, and the men whose ears were so big that they covered their bodies;[18] so nearly has the modern African kept to the wonder-tales that were current in the time of Pliny.[19]
An unquestionable account of a fireless tribe would be of the highest interest to the ethnographer, proving, as it would do, a great step forward made by the races who can produce fire, for this is an art which, once learnt, could hardly be lost. But when we see that stories of such tribes have been set up again and again without any sound basis, while further information, when brought to bear on a series of such stories, tells against them so far as it goes, we are hardly warranted in trusting others of the same kind just because we have no means of testing them. A cause is required for the appearance of such stories in the world, but it does not follow that this cause must be the real existence of fireless tribes; a mere belief in their existence will answer the purpose, and this belief is known to have been current for ages, especially coming out in the Prometheus-legends of various regions of the world. Experience shows how such an idea, when once fairly afloat, will assert itself from time to time in stories furnished with place, date, and circumstance. It must be remembered, too, that the fireless men form only one of a number of races mentioned by writers, old and new, as being distinguished by the want of something which man usually possesses, who have no language, no names, no idea of spiritual beings, no dreams, no mouths, no heads, or no noses, but whose real existence more accurate knowledge has by no means tended to confirm.
In connexion with the stories of fireless tribes, some accounts of a kind of transitional state may be mentioned here. Mr. Backhouse was told by a native of Van Diemen's Land, that his ancestors had no means of making fire before their acquaintance with Europeans. They got it first from the sky, and preserved it by carrying firebrands about with them, and if these went out, they looked for the smoke of the fire of some other party, or for smouldering remains of a lately-abandoned fire of their own.[20] This curious account fits with the Tasmanian myth recorded by Mr. Milligan, which tells how fire was thrown down like a star by two black-fellows, who are now in the sky, the twin stars Castor and Pollux.[21] Moreover, Mr. Milligan himself, on the question being put to him, has answered it in a way very much corresponding to Mr. Backhouse's account, to the effect that the Tasmanians never produced fire by artificial means at all, but always carried it with them from one camping place to another. Again, a statement of the same kind is reported to have been made by Mr. MacDonall Stuart at the 1864 Meeting of the British Association, that fire was obtained by the natives of the southern part of Australia by the friction of two pieces of wood over a bunch of dry grass; but that in the north this mode is unknown, fire-brands being constantly carried about and renewed, and if, by any accident, they become extinguished, a journey of great length has to be undertaken in order to obtain fire from other natives.[22] So Mr. Angas declares that some tribes of West Australia have no means of kindling fire, but if it goes out they get it from some encampment near; they say that their fire formerly came down from the north.[23] With these statements two things must be borne in mind. The simple apparatus for making fire by friction was in common use among Australian tribes, and in Tasmania. And it has been several times remarked that Australians, although acquainted with the art of making new fire with this instrument, yet finding the process troublesome, especially in wet weather, carry burning brands about with them everywhere, so as to be able to light a fire at a moment's notice.[24]
The accounts, then, of the finding of fireless tribes are of a highly doubtful character; possibly true to some extent, but not probably so. Of the existence of others who are possessed of fire, but cannot produce it for themselves, there is more considerable evidence. But, on the other hand, both the possession of fire, and the art of making it, belong certainly to the vast majority of mankind, and have done so as far back as we can trace. The methods, however, which have been found in use for making fire are very various. A survey of the condition of the art in different parts of the world, as known to us by direct evidence, is enough to make it probable that nearly all the different processes found in use are the successors of ruder ones; and, besides this, there is a mass of indirect evidence which fills up some of the shortcomings of history, as it does in the investigation of the Stone Age. Among some of the highest races of mankind, the lower methods of fire-making are still to be seen cropping out through the higher processes by which, for so many ages, they have been overlaid. The friction of two pieces of wood may perhaps be the original means of fire-making used by man; but, between the rudest and the most artificial way in which this may be done, there is a considerable range of progress.
Fig. 20.
One of the simplest machines for producing fire is that which may be called the "stick-and- groove." A blunt-pointed stick is run along a groove of its own making in a piece of wood lying on the ground, somewhat as shown in the imaginary drawing, Fig. 20. Mr. Darwin says that the very light wood of the Hibiscus tiliaceus was alone used for the purpose in Tahiti. A native would produce fire with it in a few seconds; he himself found it very hard work, but at length succeeded. This stick-and-groove process has been repeatedly described in the South Sea Islands, namely, in Tahiti, New Zealand, the Sandwich, Tonga, Samoa, and Radack groups;[25] but I have never found it distinctly mentioned out of this region of the world. Even should it be known elsewhere, its isolation in a particular district round which other processes prevail would still be an ethnographical fact of some importance. It is to be noticed also, that it comes much nearer than "fire-drilling" to the yet simpler process of striking fire with two pieces of split bamboo. The silicious coating of this cane makes it possible to strike fire with it; and this is done in Eastern Asia, and also in the great Malay islands of Borneo and Sumatra,[26] at or near the source whence the higher Polynesian race is supposed to have spread over the Pacific Islands. But it would appear that the striking fire with bamboo, simple as it seems, is for some reason not so convenient as the use of the more complex friction-apparatus; for Marsden seems to consider the fire-drill as the regular native instrument in Sumatra, though he says he has also seen the same effect produced more simply by rubbing one bit of bamboo, with a sharp edge, across another.
By a change in the way of working, the "stick-and-groove" becomes the "fire-drill." I have been obliged to coin both these terms, no suitable ones being forthcoming. The fire-drill, in its simplest form, is represented in Fig. 21; and Captain Cook's remarks on it and its use, among the native tribes of Australia, may serve also as a general description of it all over the world, setting aside minor details. "They produce fire with great facility, and spread it in a wonderful manner. To produce it they take two pieces of dry soft wood; one is a stick about eight or nine inches long, the other piece is flat: the stick they shape into an obtuse point at one end, and pressing it upon the other, turn it nimbly by holding it between both their hands, as we do a chocolate mill, often shifting their hands up, and then moving them down upon it, to increase the pressure as much as possible. By this method they get fire in less than two minutes, and from the smallest spark they increase it with great speed and dexterity."[27] The same instrument is known in Tasmania.[28]
Fig. 21.
Fig. 22.
The name of "fire-drill" has not, however, been adopted merely with reference to this simplest form. This rude instrument is, as may well be supposed, very wasteful of time and power, and it has been improved by several contrivances which so closely correspond to those applied to boring-tools, that the most convenient plan is to classify them together. Even the clumsy plan of the simple fire-drill has been found in use for boring holes. It has been mentioned at page 188, as in use for drilling hard stone among rude Indians of South America, and, what is much more surprising, the natives of Madagascar bored holes by working their drill between the palms of their hands,[43] though they were so far advanced in the arts as to make and use iron tools, and of course, the very drills worked in this primitive way were pointed with iron.
Fig. 23.
The principle of the common carpenter's brace, with which he works his centre-bit, is applied to fire-making by a very simple device represented in Fig. 23, which is drawn according to Mr. Darwin's description of the plan used by the Gauchos of the Pampas; "taking an elastic stick about eighteen inches long, he presses one end on his breast, and the other (which is pointed) in a hole in a piece of wood, and then rapidly turns the curved part, like a carpenter's centre-bit."[44] The Gauchos, it should be observed, are not savages, but half-wild herdsmen of mixed European, Indian, and African blood, who would probably only use such a means of kindling fire when the flint and steel were for the moment not at hand, and their fire-drill is not only like the carpenter's brace, but most likely suggested by it.
To wind a cord or thong round the drill, so as, by pulling the two ends alternately, to make it revolve very rapidly, is a great improvement on mere hand-twirling. As Kuhn has pointed out, this contrivance was in use for boring in Europe in remote times; Odysseus describes it in telling how he and his companions put out the eye of the Cyclops:—
οἱ μὲν μοχλὸν ἑλόντες ἐλάϊνον, ὀξὺν ἐπ᾿ ἄκρῳ,
ὀφθαλμῷ ἐνέρεισαν• ἐγὼ δ ἐφύπερθεν ἀερθεὶς,
δίνεον• ὡς ὅτε τις ότρυπ δόρυ νήϊυν ἀνὴρ
τρυπάνῳ, οἱ δέ τ' ἔνερθεν ὑποσσείουσιν ἱμάντι
ἁψάμενοι ἑκάτερθε, τὸ δὲ τρέχει εμμενὲς αἰεί.[45]
"They then seizing the sharp-cut stake of the wood of the olive
Thrust it into his eye. the while I standing above them,
Bored it into the hole:—as a shipwright, boreth a timber,
Guiding the drill that his men below drive backward and forward,
Pulling the ends of the thong while the point runs round without
ceasing."
Fig. 24.
Fig. 25.
Fig. 26.
To substitute for the mere thong or cord a bow with a loose string, is a still further improvement, for one hand now does the work of two in driving the spindle. The centre, in which its end turns, may be held down with the other hand, or (as is very usual), set against the breast of the operator. The bow- drill thus formed, is a most ancient and well-known boring instrument, familiar to the artisan in modern Europe as it was in ancient Egypt. The only place where I have found any notice of its use for fire-making is among the North American Indians. The plate from which Fig. 26 is taken is marked by Schoolcraft as representing the apparatus used by the Sioux, or Dacotahs. They, as well as the Naskapee Indians of Canada, whom Dr. D. Wilson notices as making fire with a bow-drill, may possibly have caught the idea from the European boring instrument.[51]
Lastly, there is a curious little contrivance, known to English toolmakers as the "pump-drill," from its being worked up and down like a pump. That kept in the London tool-shops is all of metal, expanding into a bulb instead of the disk shown in Fig. 27, which represents the kind used in Switzerland, consisting of a wooden spindle, armed with a steel point, and weighted with a wooden disk. A string is made fast to the ends of the cross-piece, and in the middle to the top of the spindle. As the hand brings the cross-piece down it unwinds the cord, driving the spindle round; as the hand is lifted again, the disk, acting as a fly-wheel, runs on and re-winds the cord, and so on. Holtzappfel says that the pump-drill is as well known among the Oriental nations as the breast-drill, though it is little used in England except by china and glass menders.[52] Perhaps it may have found its way over from Asia to the South Sea Islands; at any rate it is found there. Fig. 28 shows it as used in Fakaafo or Bowditch Island, differing from the Swiss form only in being armed with a stone instead of a steel point, and in having no hole through the cross-piece.[53]
Fig. 27. |
|
Fig. 28. |
Fig. 29.
It is now necessary to notice other methods of producing fire which have been found in use in various parts of the world. There is a well-known scientific toy made to show that heat is generated by the compression of air. It consists of a brass tube closed at one end, into which a packed piston is sharply forced down, thus igniting a piece of tinder within the tube. It is curious to find an apparatus on this principle (made in hard wood, ivory, &c.) used as a practical means of making fire in Birmah, and even among the Malays.[56]
The natives of Tierra del Fuego are notably distinguished from their northern neighbours by their way of fire-making. In 1520, Magalhaens on his famous voyage visited the gigantic Patagonians, who thought the Spaniards had come down from heaven, and who, explaining to the European visitors the native theology, told them of their chief god, Setebos. The savages from whom Shakespeare borrowed these traits to furnish the picture of the "servant-monster," Caliban,[57] showed their manner of making fire, which was by the friction of two pieces of wood.[58] But the Fuegians have for centuries used a higher method, striking sparks with a flint from a piece of iron pyrites upon their tinder. This process is described as still in use,[59] and is evidently what Captain Wallis meant by saying (in 1767), that "To kindle a fire they strike a pebble against a piece of mundic."[60] A much earlier account of the same thing appears in the voyage of Sarmiento de Gamboa, in 1579-80.[61] Iron pyrites answers extremely well instead of the steel, and was found in regular use in high northern latitudes in America, among the Slave and Dog Rib Indians.[62] It is probably the "iron-stone" which the Esquimaux call ujarak-saviminilik, and from which they strike fire with a fragment of flint,[63] and is perhaps referred to in Father Le Jeune's statement that the Algonquin Indians strike fire with two minerals (pierres de mine).[64] The use of iron pyrites for striking fire was known to the Greeks and Romans, and it shared with flint the name of fire-stone, πυρίτης, pyrites, which it and some other metallic sulphurets have since taken entire possession of.
The Alashkans are reported to obtain fire by striking together two pieces of quartz rubbed with sulphur over some dry grass or moss, strewed with feathers where the sulphur falls; and similar descriptions of the process are given in the adjacent islands.[65] Father Zucchelli, who was a missionary in West Africa about the beginning of last century, gives the following account of the way in which, he says, the negroes made fire on their journeys:—"When they found a fire-stone (Feuerstein) on the road, they lay down by it on their knees, took a little piece of wood in their hands, and threw sand between the stone and the wood, rubbing them so long against one another till the wood began to burn, and herewith they all lighted their pipes, and so went speedily forth again smoking on their journey."[66] It is possible that not flint (as is usual), but pyrites, may here be meant by feuerstein.
The flint and steel may have come into use at any time after the beginning of the Iron age, but history fails to tell us the date of its introduction in Greece and Rome, China, and most other districts of the Old World. In modern times it has made its way with iron into many new places, though it has not always been able to supersede the fire-sticks at once; sometimes, it seems, from a difficulty in getting flints. For instance it was necessary in Sumatra to import the flints from abroad, and thus they did not come immediately into general use among the natives; and there may perhaps be a similar reason for the fire-drill having held its ground to this day among some of the iron-using races of Southern Africa.
The Greeks were familiar with the use of the burning-lens in the time of Aristophanes, who mentions it in the ' Clouds,' in a dialogue between Socrates and Strepsiades:—
"Socrates. Very good: now I'll set yon another smart question. If some one entered an action against you to recover five talents, tell me, how would you cancel it?
Strepsiades. I have found a very clever way to cancel the suit, as you will agree yourself.
Socrates. What kind of a way?
Strepsiades. Have you ever seen that stone in the druggists' shops, that pretty, transparent one, that they light fire with?
Socrates. The crystal, you mean?
Strepsiades. I do.
Socrates. Well, what then?
Strepsiades. Suppose I take this, and when the clerk enters the suit, I stand thus, a long way off. towards the sun, and melt out the letters.
Socrates. Very clever, by the Graces! "[67]
At a much later period Pliny mentions that glass balls with water put into them, when set opposite to the sun, get so hot as to set clothes on fire; and that he finds surgeons consider the best means of cautery to be a crystal ball placed opposite to the sun's rays.[68] The Chinese commonly use the burning-lens to light fire with, as well as the flint and steel, and we hear of the Siamese using it to produce new sacred fire.[69]
The fact that fire may be produced by reflecting the sun's rays with mirrors was known as early as Pliny's time (A.D. 23-79), as he remarks, "seeing that concave mirrors placed opposite to the sun's rays ignite things more easily than any other fire."[70] There is some reason to suppose that the knowledge of this phenomenon worked backwards into history, attaching itself to two famous names of old times, Archimedes and Numa Pompilius. The story of Archimedes setting the fleet on fire at Syracuse with burning mirrors, probably un- known as it was to historians for centuries after his time, need not be further remarked on here; but the story of Numa reappears on the other side of the world, under circumstances which make its discussion a matter of importance to ethnography.
It is related by Plutarch in his life of Numa, written in the first century, that among the ordinances made for the Vestal Virgins when they were established in Rome, there was the following. If the sacred fire which it was their duty to keep continually burning should happen to go out, it was not to be lighted again from another fire, but new fire was to be made by lighting from the sun a pure and undefiled flame. "And they kindle it especially with vessels which are shaped hollow from the side of an isosceles triangle with a (vertical) right angle, and converge from the circumference to a single centre. When such an instrument is set opposite to the sun, so that the impinging rays from all sides crowd and fold together round the centre, it divides the rarefied air, and quickly kindles the lightest and driest matters applied to it, the beams acquiring by the repulsion a body and fiery stroke."[71] Stories of Numa's ordinances will hardly be claimed as sober history, though it is possible that such a process as this may have been used, at least in late times, to rekindle the fire of Vesta. But there is in Festus another account of the way in which this was done, having in its favour every analogy from the practices of kindling the sacred fire among our Indo-European race, both in Asia and in Europe. "If the fire of Vesta were extinguished, the virgins were scourged by the priests, whose practice it was to drill into a board of auspicious wood till the fire came, which was received and carried to the temple by the virgin, in a brazen colander."[72]
The parallel passage to that in the life of Numa is to be found in the account of the feast of Raymi, or the Sun, celebrated in ancient Peru, according to Garcilaso de la Vega, whose 'Commentaries' were first published in 1609-16, the Spanish discovery having taken place in 1527. He says this festival was celebrated at the summer solstice. "The fire for this sacrifice had to be new, given, as they said, by the hand of the sun. For which purpose they took a great bracelet, which they call Chipana (like the others which the Incas commonly wore on the left wrist), which bracelet the high priest kept; it was larger than the common ones, and had as its medallion a concave cup like a half orange, highly polished; they set it against the sun, and at a certain point where the rays issuing from the cup came together, they put a little finely-carded cotton, as they did not know how to make tinder, which shortly took fire, as it naturally does. With this fire, thus given by the hand of the Sun, the sacrifice was burnt, and all the meat of the day was roasted. And they carried some of the fire to the Temple of the Sun, and to the House of the Virgins, where they kept it up all the year, and it was a bad omen if they let it out in any way. If, on the eve of the festival, which was when the necessary preparations for the following day were made, there was no sun to light the new fire, they made it with two thin smooth sticks as big as one's little finder, and half a yard long, boring one against the other (barrenando uno con otro); these little sticks are cinnamon coloured, and they call both the sticks themselves and the fire-making V-yaca, one and the same term serving for noun and verb. The Indians use them instead of flint and steel, and carry them on their journeys to get fire when they have to pass the night in uninhabited places," etc. etc.[73]
If circumstantiality of detail were enough to make a story credible, we might be obliged to receive this one, and even to argue on the wonderful agreement of the manner of kindling the sacred fire in Rome and in Peru. But the coincidences between Garcilaso's Virgins of the Sun and Plutarch's Vestal Virgins go farther than this. We are not only expected to believe that there were Virgins of the Sun, that they kept up a sacred fire whose extinction was an evil omen, and that this fire was lighted by the sun's rays concentrated in a concave mirror. We are also told that in Cuzco, as in Rome, the virgin found unfaithful was to be punished by the special punishment of being buried alive.[74] This is really too much. Whatever may be the real basis of fact in the accounts of the Virgins of the Sun and the feast of Raymi, the inference seems, to me at least, most probable, that part or all of the accessory detail is not history, but the realization of an idea of which Garcilaso himself strikes the key-note when he says of this same feast of Raymi, that it was celebrated by the Incas "in the city of Cozco, which was another Rome" (que fue otra Roma).[75] Those who happen to have experience of the old chroniclers of Spanish America know how the whole race was possessed by a passion for bringing out the Old World stories in a new guise, with a local habitation and a name in America. Garcilaso's story of the burning-mirror, supposing it to be an adaptation from Plutarch, would not even be the best illustration of this modern phase of Mythology; that distinction must be reserved for the reproduction by another chronicler of another of Plutarch's stories, that of the shout that was raised when the Roman Herald proclaimed the liberty of the Greeks,—such a shout that it brought the crows tumbling down into the racecourse from the sky above.[76] The Incas, says Sarmiento, "were so feared, that if they went out through the kingdom, and allowed a curtain of their litters to be lifted that their vassals might see them, they raised so great an acclamation that they made the birds fall from where they were flying above, so that the people could catch them in their hands."[77]
Against the abstract possibility of Garcilaso's story of the lighting of the sacred fire with concave mirrors, there is no more to be said than against Plutarch's. With a good parabolic mirror only two inches in diameter, I have lighted brown paper under an English sun of no extraordinary power, and other surfaces which will make a good caustic will answer, though of course they have less burning power than a paraboloid of revolution of equal size. There is even a material basis out of which the Peruvian story may have grown. In the ancient tombs of Peru, mirrors both of pyrites and obsidian have been found. Some, three or four inches in diameter, were probably mere broken nodules of pyrites, polished on the flat side, but one is mentioned measuring about a foot and a half (probably in circumference), which had a beautifully-polished concave surface, so as to magnify objects considerably,[78] and such a mirror may have been used for making fire. Indeed, the objection to the story of the Virgins of the Sun is not that any of the details I have mentioned must of necessity be untrue, but that the apparent traces of absorption from Plutarch invalidate whatever rests on Garcilaso de la Vega's unsupported testimony.
To conclude the notice of the art of fire-making in general, its last phase, the invention of lucifer matches in our own day, is fast spreading over the world, and bringing most other fire-making instruments down to the condition of curious relics of a past time.
But though some of the higher methods date far back in the history of the Old World, the employment of the wooden friction- apparatus in Europe, even for the practical purposes of ordinary life, has come up through the classical and mediæval times into the last century, and for all we know it may still exist. Pliny speaks of its finding a use among the outposts of armies and among shepherds, a stone to strike fire with not being always to be had;[79] and in a remarkable account dating from 1768, which will be quoted presently, its use by Russian peasants for making fire in the woods is spoken of as an existing custom, just as, at a much more recent date, it is mentioned that the Portuguese Brazilians still have recourse to the fire-drill, when no other means of getting a light are forthcoming.[80] For the most part, however, the early use of the instrument in the Old World is only to be traced in ancient myths, in certain ceremonial practices which have been brought down unchanged into a new state of culture, and in descriptions by Greek and Roman writers of the art. It had lost, even then, its practical importance in everyday life, though lingering on, as it still does in our own day, in rites for which it was necessary to use pure wild fire, not the tame fire that lay like a domestic animal upon the hearth.
The traditions of inventors of the art of fire-making by the friction of wood have in so far an historical value, that they bring clearly into view a period when this was the usual practice. There is a Chinese myth that points to such a state of things, and which moreover presents, in the story of the "fire-bird," an analogy with a set of myths belonging to our own race, which may well be due to a deep-lying ethnological connexion. "A great sage went to walk beyond the bounds of the moon and the sun; he saw a tree, and on this tree a bird, which pecked at it and made fire come forth. The sage was struck with this, took a branch of the tree and produced fire from it, and thence this great personage was called Suy-jin."[81] The friction-apparatus itself, apparently of the kind spoken of here as the fire-drill, is mentioned in Morrison's Chinese Dictionary. "Suy, an instrument to obtain fire. A speculum for obtaining fire from the sun is called suy or kin-suy. Muh-suy, an utensil to procure fire from wood by rotatory friction. Suy-jin-she, the first person who procured fire for the use of man." The very existence of a Chinese name for the fire-drill shows that it is, or has been, in use in the country.
The absence of evidence relating to fire-making in the Bible is remarkable. If, indeed, the following passage from the cosmogony of Sanchoniathon be founded on a Phœnician legend, it preserves an old Semitic record of the use of the fire-stick. "They say that from the wind Kolpia, and his wife Baan, which is interpreted Night, there were born mortal men, called Æon and Protogonos; and Æon found how to get food from trees. And those born from them were called Genos and Genea, and they inhabited Phœnicia. . . . Moreover, they say that, again, from Genos, son of Æon and Protogonos, they were born mortal children, whose names were Phos, Pur, and Phlox (Light, Fire, and Flame). These, they say, found out how to make fire from the friction of pieces of wood, and taught its use."[82] Fire-making by friction is not unknown to the Arabs, their instru- ment being the simple fire-drill.
Though direct history does not tell us that the Finns and Lapps used the fire-drill before they had the flint and steel, there is a passage safely preserving the memory of its use in a Finnish poem, whose native metre is familiar to our ears from its imitation in 'Hiawatha;'
"Panu parka, Tuonen poika,
kirnusi tulisen kirnun,
säkeisin säihytteli,
pukemissa puhtaissa,
walkehissa waatteissa."
"Panu, the poor son of Tuoni.
Churning fiercely at the fire-churn,
Scattering fiery sparks around him,
Clothèd in a pure white garment,
In a white and shining garment."[83]
It is, however, by our own race that the most remarkable body of evidence of the ancient use of the fire-drill has been preserved. The very instrument still used in India for kindling the sacrificial fire seems never to have changed since the time when our ancestors left their eastern home to invade Europe. It is thus described:—"The process by which fire is obtained from wood is called churning, as it resembles that by which butter in India is separated from milk. . . . It consists in drilling one piece of arani-wood into another by pulling a string tied to it with a jerk with the one hand, while the other is slackened, and so alternately till the wood takes fire. The fire is received on cotton or flax held in the hand of an assistant Brahman."[84] By this description it would seem that the Indian instrument is the same in principle as the Esquimaux thong-drill, shown in Fig. 24. It is driven by a three-stranded cord of cowhair and hemp; and there is probably a piece of wood pressed down upon the upper end of the spindle, to keep it down to its bearing.[85] In the name of Prometheus, the Fire-maker, the close connection with the Sanskrit name of this spindle, pramantha, has never been broken. Possibly both he and the Chinese Suy-jin may be nothing more than personifications of the fire-drill.
Professor Kuhn, in his mythological treatise on 'Fire and Ambrosia,' has collected a quantity of evidence from Greek and Latin authors, which makes it appear that the fire-making instrument, whose use was kept up in Europe, was not the stick-and-groove, but the fire-drill. The operation is distinctly described as boring or drilling; and it seems, moreover, that the fire-drill was worked in ancient Europe, as in India and among the Esquimaux, with a cord or thong, for the spindle is compared to, or spoken of as, a τρύπανον, which instrument, as appears in the passage quoted from the Odyssey at page 241, was a drill driven by a thong.[86]
The traces of the old fire-making in modern Europe lie, for the most part, in close connexion with the ancient and widespread rite of the New Fire, which belongs to the Aryans among other branches of the human race, and especially with one variety of this rite, which has held its own even in Germany and England into quite late times, in spite of all the efforts of the Church to put it down. This is what the Germans call nothfeuer, and we, needfire; though whether the term is to be understood literally, or whether it has dropped a guttural, and stands for fire made by kneading or rubbing, is not clear.
What the nature and object of the needfire is, may be seen in Reiske's account of the practice in Germany in the seventeenth century:—"When a murrain has broken out among the great and small cattle, and the herds have suffered much harm, the farmers determine to make a needfire. On an appointed day there must be no single flame of fire in any house or on any hearth. From each house straw, and water, and brushwood must be fetched, and a stout oak-post driven fast into the ground, and a hole bored through it; in this a wooden wind- lass is stuck, well smeared with cart-pitch and tar, and turned round so long that, with the fierce heat and force, it gives forth fire. This is caught in proper materials, increased with straw, heath, and brushwood, till it creaks out into a full needfire; and this must he somewhat spread out lengthways between walls or fences, and the cattle and horses hunted with sticks and whips two or three times through it," etc.[87] Various ways of arranging the apparatus are mentioned by Reiske and other authorities quoted by Grimm, such as fixing the spindle between two posts, etc. How the spindle is turned is sometimes doubtful; but in several places the Indian practice of driving it with a rope wound round it, and pulled backwards and forwards, comes clearly into view; while sometimes a cart wheel is spun round upon an axle; or a spindle is worked round with levers, or two planks are rubbed violently together, till the fire comes.[88]
The needfire seems to have been kept up to late years in Germany. In Great Britain the most modern account I have met with dates from 1826.[89] The 'Mirror' of June 24th of that year takes from the 'Perth Courier' a description of the rite, as performed not far from Perth, by a farmer who had lost several cattle by some disease:—"A few stones were piled together in the barn-yard, and wood-coals having been laid thereon, the fuel was ignited by will-fire, that is, fire obtained by friction: the neighbours having been called in to witness the solemnity, the cattle were made to pass through the flames, in the order of their dignity and age, commencing with the horses and ending with the swine."
Some varieties of the rite of the New Fire, connected with the Sun-worship so deeply rooted in the popular mind from before the time of the Vedas, were countenanced, or at least tolerated, by the Church. Such are the bonfires at Easter, Midsummer Eve, and some other times; and, in one case, there is ground for supposing that the old rite was taken up into the Roman Church, in the practice of putting out the church candles on Easter Eve, and lighting them again with consecrated new-made fire,—
"On Easter Eve the fire all is quencht in every place,
And fresh againe from out the flint is fetcht with solemne grace:
The priest doth halow this against great daungers many one,
A brande whereof doth every man with greedie mind take home,
That. when the feareful storme appeares, or tempest black arise,
By lighting this he safe may be from stroke of hurtful skies."[90]
Here the traces of the Indian mythology come out with beautiful clearness. The lightning is the fire that flies from the heavenly fire-churn, as the gods whirl it in the clouds. The New Fire is its representative on earth; and, like the thunderbolt, preserves from the lightning flash the house in which it is, for the lightning strikes no place twice.
It has been stated by Montanus that in very early times the perpetual lamps in churches were lighted by fire made by friction of dry wood.[91] But in the ceremony of later times the flint and steel has superseded the ancient friction-fire; and, indeed, the Western clergy, as a rule, discountenanced it as heathenish. In the Capitularies of Carloman, in the eighth century, there is a prohibition of "illos sacrilegos ignes quos niedfyr vocant."[92] The result of this opposition by the Church was, in great measure, to break the connexion between the old festivals of the Sun, which the Church allowed, and the lighting of the needfire, which is so closely connected with the Sun-worship in our ancient Aryan mythology. Still, even in Germany, there are documents that bring the two together. A glossary to the Capitularies says, "the rustic folks in many places in Germany, and indeed on the feast of St. John the Baptist, pull a stake from a hedge and bind a rope round it, which they pull hither and thither till it takes fire," etc.; and a Low German book of 1593 speaks of the "nodfüre, that they sawed out of wood" to light the St. John's bonfire, and through which the people leapt and ran, and drove their cattle.[93]
It appears, however, that the Eastern and Western churches differed widely in their treatment of the old rite. The Western clergy discountenanced, and, as far as they could, put down the needfire: but in Russia it was not only allowed, but was (and very likely may be still) practised under ecclesiastical sanction, the priest being the chief actor in the ceremony. This interesting fact seems not to have been known to Grimm and Kuhn, and the following passage, which proves it, is still further remarkable as asserting that the ancient fire-making by friction was still used in Russia for practical as well as ceremonial purposes in the last century. It is contained in an account of the adventures of four Russian sailors, who were driven by a storm upon the desert island of East-Spitzbergen.[94] "They knew, however, that if one rubs violently together two pieces of dry wood, one hard and the other soft, the latter will catch fire. Besides this being the way in which the Russian peasants obtain fire when they are in the woods, there is also a religious ceremony, performed in every village where there is a church, which could not have been unknown to them. Perhaps it will be not disagreeable for me here to give an account of this ceremony, though it does not belong to the story. The 18th of August, Old Style, is called by the Russians Frol i Lavior, these being the names of two martyrs, called Florus and Laurus in the Roman Kalendar; they fall, according to this latter, on the 29th of the said month, when the Festival of the Beheading of John is celebrated. On this day the Russian peasants bring their horses to the village church, at the side of which they have dug the evening before a pit with two outlets. Each horse has his bridle, which is made of limetree bark. They let the horses, one after the other, go into this pit, at the opposite outlet of which the priest stands with an asperging-brush in his hand, with which he sprinkles them with holy water. As soon as the horses are come out, their bridles are taken off, and they are made to go between two fires, which are kindled with what the Russians call Givoy agon, that is, 'living fire,' of which I will give the explanation, after remarking that The peasants throw the bridles of the horses into one of these fires to burn them up. Here is the manner of kindling this Givoy agon, or living fire. Some men take hold of the ends of a maple staff, very dry, and about a fathom long. This staff they hold fast over a piece of birch-wood, which must also be very dry, and whilst they vigorously rub the staff upon the last wood, which is much softer than the first, it inflames in a short time, and serves to kindle the pair of fires, of which I have just made mention."
To sum up now, in a few words, the history of the art of making fire, it appears that the common notion that the friction of two pieces of wood was the original method used, has strong and wide-lying evidence in its favour, and very little that can be alleged against it. It has been seen that in many districts where higher methods have long prevailed, its former existence as a household art is proved by traces that have come down to us in several different ways. Where the use of pyrites for striking fire is found existing in company with it in North America, it is at least likely that the fire-stick is the older instrument. Perhaps the most notable fact bearing on this question is the use of pyrites by the miserable inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego. I do not know that the fire-sticks have ever been seen among them, but it seems more reasonable to suppose that they were used till they were supplanted by the discovery of the fire-making property of pyrites, than to make so insignificant a people an exception to a world-wide rule. This art of striking fire instead of laboriously producing it with the drill is not, indeed, the only thing in which the culture of this race stands above that of their northern neighbours, for, as has been mentioned, these last were found using no navigable craft but rafts, while the Fuegians had bark canoes, and those by no means of the lowest quality. It is worthy of note that the Peruvians, though they had pyrites, and broke the nodules to polish the faces into mirrors, do not seem to have used it to strike fire with. If they did not, their civilization stood in this matter below that of the much-despised Fuegians. The ancient Mexicans also made mirrors of polished pyrites, and perhaps they may have used it to strike fire;[95] but the wooden friction-apparatus was certainly common among them. Even the fire-drills of Peru and Mexico were of the simplest kind, twirled between the hands without any contrivance to lessen the labour, so that even the rude Esquimaux and Indian tribes have reached, in this respect, a higher stage of art than these comparatively civilized peoples.
To turn now from the art of making fire to one of its principal uses to mankind. The art of Cooking is as universal as Fire itself among the human race; but there are found, even among savages, several different processes that come under the general term, and a view of the distribution of these processes over the world may throw some light on the early development of Human Culture.
Roasting or broiling by direct exposure to the fire seems the one method universally known to mankind, but the use of some kind of oven is also very general. The Andaman Islanders keep fire continually smouldering in hollow trees, so that they have only to clear away the ashes at any time to cook their little pigs and fish.[96] In Africa the natives take possession of a great ant- hill, destroy the ants, and clear out the inside, leaving only the clay walls standing, which they make red hot with a fire, so as to bake joints of rhinoceros within.[97] But these are unusual expedients, and a much commoner form of savage oven is a mere pit in the ground. In the most elaborate kind of this cooking in underground ovens, hot stones are put in with the food, as in the familiar South-Sea Island practice, which is too well known to need description. The Malagasy plan seems to be the same;[98] but the Polynesians and their connexions have by no means a monopoly of the art, which is practised with little or no difference in other parts of the world. In the Morea, the traveller's dinner is often prepared by making a fire in a hole in the ground, in which a kid or lamb is afterwards placed, and covered in by a stone made hot for the purpose. The Canary Islanders buried meat in a hole in the ground, and lighted a fire over it;[99] and a similar practice is still sometimes found in the island of Sardinia,[100] while among the Beduins, and in places in North and South America, the process comes even closer to that used in the South Seas.[101] It is this wide diffusion of the art which makes it somewhat doubtful whether Klemm is right in considering its occurrence in Australia as one of the results of intercourse with more civilized islands. The natives cook in underground ovens on very distant parts of the coast; sometimes hot stones are used, and sometimes not.[102]
When meat or vegetables are kept for many hours on a grating above a slow fire, the combination of roasting and smoking brings the food into a state in which it will keep for a long while, even in the tropics. Jean de Lery, in the account of his adventures among the Indians of Brazil, about 1557, describes the wooden grating set up on four forked posts, "which in their language they call a boucan;" on this they cooked food with a slow fire underneath, and as they did not salt their meat, this process served them as a means of keeping their game and fish.[103] To the word boucan belongs the term boucanier, bucaneer, given to the French hunters of St. Domingo, from their preparing the flesh of the wild oxen and boars in this way, and applied less appropriately to the rovers of the Spanish Main. The process has been found elsewhere in South America,[104] and perhaps as far North as Florida.[105] The Haitian name for a framework of sticks set upon posts, barbacoa, was adopted into Spanish and English; for instance, the Peruvian air-bridges, made over difficult ground by setting up on piles a wattled flooring covered with earth, are called barbacoas;[106] and Dampier speaks of having "a Barbacue of split Bambooes to sleep on."[107] 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;[108] 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 that since the Assinaboins had learnt from the Mandans to make pottery, and had been supplied with vessels by the traders, they had entirely done away the custom, "excepting at public festivals; where they seem, like all others of the human family, to take pleasure in cherishing and perpetuating their ancient customs."[109] Elsewhere among the Sioux or Dacotas, to whom the Assinaboins belong, the tradition has been preserved that their fathers used to cook the game in its own skin, which they set up on four sticks planted in the ground, and put water, meat, and hot stones into it.[110] The Sioux had the art of stone-boiling in common with the mass of the northern tribes. Father Charlevoix, writing above a century ago, speaks of the Indians of the North as using wooden kettles and boiling the water in them by throwing in red-hot stones, but even then iron pots were superseding both these vessels and the pottery of other tribes.[111] To specify more particularly, the Micmacs and Souriquois,[112] the Blackfeet and the Crees,[113] are known to have been stone-boilers; the Shoshonees or Snake Indians, like the far more northerly tribes of Slaves, Dog-Ribs, etc.,[114] still make, or lately made, their pots of roots plaited or rather twined so closely that they will hold water, boiling their food in them with hot stones;[115] while west of the Rocky Mountains, the Indians used similar baskets to boil salmon, acorn porridge, and other food in,[116] or wooden vessels such as Captain Cook found at Nootka Sound, and La Pérouse at Port Français.[117] Lastly, Sir Edward Belcher met with the practice of stone-boiling in 1826 among the Esquimaux of Icy Cape.[118]
So instantly is the art of stone-boiling supplanted by the kettles of the white trader, that, unless perhaps in the north-west, it might be hard to find it in existence now. But the state of things in North America, as known to us in earlier times, is somewhat as follows. The Mexicans, and the races between them and the Isthmus of Panama, were potters at the time of the Spanish discovery, and the art extended northward over an immense district, lying mostly between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic, and stretching up into Canada. In Eastern North America the first European discoverers found the art of earthenware-making in full operation, and forming a regular part of the women's work, and on this side of the continent, as high at least as New England, the site of an Indian village may be traced, like so many of the ancient settlements in the Old World, by innumerable fragments of pottery. But the Stone-Boilers extended far south on the Pacific side, and also occupied what may be roughly called the northern half of North America.
In that north-eastern corner of Asia which is of such extreme interest to the ethnographer, as preserving the lower human culture so near the high Asiatic civilization, and yet so little influenced by it, the art of Stone-boiling was found in full force. The Kamchadals, like some American tribes, used hollowed wooden troughs for the purpose, and long resisted the use of the iron cooking pots of the Russians, considering that the food only kept its flavour properly when dressed in the old-fashioned way.[119]
Thus the existence of a great district of Stone-Boilers in Northern Asia and America is made out by direct evidence, but beside this we know of the practice in a southern district of the world.
In Australia, Mr. T. Baines mentions native cooking-places seen on the Victoria River in 1855-6, small holes in the ground, where fish, water-tortoise, and, in one instance, a small alligator, had been made to boil by the immersion of heated stones in the water.[120] Thus the Australians, at least in modern times, must be counted as stone-boilers. Concerning the New Zealanders, Captain Cook made a remark that "having no vessel in which water can be boiled, their cooking consists wholly of baking and roasting.[121] But the inference that people who have no vessel that will stand the fire must therefore be unable to boil food is not a sound one. There is evidence that the Maoris knew the art of stone-boiling, though they used it but little. It is found among them under circumstances which give no ground for supposing that it was introduced after Captain Cook's visit. The curious dried human heads of New Zealand, which excel any mummies that have ever been made in the preservation of the features of the dead, were first brought over to England by Cook's party. From a careful description of the process of preparing them, made since, it appears that one thing was to parboil them (as we used to do traitors' heads for Temple Bar), and this was contrived by throwing them "into boiling water, into which red-hot stones are continually cast, to keep up the heat."[122] A remark made by another writer places the existence of stone-boiling as a native New Zealand art beyond question. "The New Zealanders, although destitute of vessels in which to boil water, had an ingenious way of heating water to the boiling point, for the purpose of making shell-fish open. This was done by putting red-hot stones into wooden vessels full of water."[123] When, therefore, we find them boiling and eating the berries of the Laurus tawa, which are harmless when boiled, but poisonous in their raw state, it is not necessary to suppose this to have been found out since Captain Cook's time, as the boiling was probably done before with hot stones.[124]
In several other Polynesian islands, it appears from Cook's journals that stone-boiling was in ordinary use in cookery. The making of a native pudding in Tahiti is thus described. Breadfruit, ripe plantains, taro, and palm or pandanus nuts, were rasped, scraped, or beaten up fine, and baked separately. A quantity of juice, expressed from cocoa-nut kernels, was put into a large tray or wooden vessel. The other articles, hot from the oven, were deposited in this vessel, and a few hot stones were also put in to make the contents simmer. Few puddings in England, he says, equal these. In the island of Anamooka, they brought him a mess of fish, soup, and yams stewed in cocoa-nut liquor, "probably in a wooden vessel, with hot stones." The practice seems to have existed in the Marquesas, and in Huaheine he describes the preparation of a dish of poi in a wooden trough with hot stones.[125] What the Polynesian notion of a pudding is, as to size, may be gathered from the account of two missionaries who arrived at the island of Rurutu, and were received by a native who paddled out to meet them through a rough sea, in a wooden poi-dish, seven feet long and two and a half wide.[126]
I fear that the Tahitian recipe for making poi must spoil the good old story of Captain Wallis's tea-urn. A native who was breakfasting on board the Dolphin saw the tea-pot filled from the urn, and presently turned the cock again and put his hand underneath, with such effects as may be imagined. Captain Wallis, knowing that the natives had no earthen vessels, and that boiling in a pot over a fire was a novelty to them, and putting all these things together in telling the story, interpreted the howls of the scalded native as he danced about the cabin, and the astonishment of the rest of the visitors, as proving that the Tahitians "having no vessel in which water could be subjected to the action of fire, . . . . had no more idea that it could be made hot, than that it could be made solid."[127] No doubt the natives were surprised at hot water coming out of so unlikely a place, but the world seems to have accepted both the story and the inference without stopping to consider that hot water could not be much of a novelty among people to whom boiled pudding was an article of daily food. Captain Wallis's story (as is so commonly the case with accounts of savages) may be matched elsewhere. "And we went now," says Kotzebue, in the account of his visit to the Radack islands, "to Rarick's dwelling, where the kettle had already been set on the fire, and the natives were assembled round it, looking at the boiling water, which seemed to them alive." Yet on another island of the same chain it is remarked that the mogomuk is made by drying the root of a plant, and pressing the meal into lumps; when it is to be eaten, some of this is broken off, stirred with water in a cocoa-nut shell, and boiled till it swells up into a thick porridge ("und kocht ihn, bis er zu einem dicken Brei aufquillt,") etc.[128]
Though the natives of the islands mentioned, and no doubt of many others, were still stone-boilers in Cook's time, pottery had already made its appearance in Polynesia, in districts so situated that the art may reasonably be supposed to have travelled from island to island from the Eastern Archipelago, where perhaps the Malays received it from Asia. By Cook and later explorers earthen vessels were found in the Pelew, Fiji, and Tonga groups, and in New Caledonia.[129] By this time it is likely that these and European vessels may have put an end to stone-boiling in Polynesia, so that its displacement by the introduction of pottery and metal will have taken place by the same combination of the influence of neighbouring tribes and of Europeans which have produced a similar effect in North America.
There is European evidence of the art of stone-boiling. The Finns have kept up into modern times a relic of the practice. Linnæus, on his famous Lapland Tour, in 1732, recorded the fact that in East Bothland "The Finnish liquor called Lura is prepared like other beer, except not being boiled, instead of which red-hot stones are thrown into it."[130] Moreover, the quantities of stones, evidently calcined, which are found buried in our own country, sometimes in the sites of ancient dwellings, give great probability to the inference which has been drawn from them, that they were used in cooking. It is true that their use may have been for baking in underground ovens, a practice found among races who are Stone-boilers, and others who are not. But it is actually on record that the wild Irish, of about 1600, used to warm their milk for drinking with a stone first cast into the fire.[131]
In Asia[132] I have met with no positive evidence of cookery by stone-boiling beyond Kamchatka, but some extremely rude boiling-vessels have been observed among Siberian tribes, the use of which is either to be explained by the absence or scarcity of earthenware or metal pots, or by the keeping up of old habits belonging to a time of such absence or scarcity. The Dutch envoy, Ysbrants Ides, remarks of the Ostyaks, "I have also seen a copper kettle among them, and some other kettles of bark sewed together, in which they can boil food over the hot coals, but not in the flame of the fire."[133] Now just such bark-kettles as these have been seen in use among a North American tribe on the Unijah, or Peace River, near the Rocky Mountains. They were stone-boilers, using for this purpose the regular watape pots, or rather baskets, of woven roots of spruce fir, but they had also kettles, "made of spruce-bark, which they hang over the fire, but at such a distance as to receive the heat without being within reach of the blaze; a very tedious operation."[134] In Siberia, among the Ostyaks, the practice has been observed of using the paunch of the slaughtered beast as a vessel to cook the blood in over the fire,[135] and the same thing has been noticed among the Reindeer Koriaks.[136] Thus the story told by Herodotus of the Scythians, who, when they had not a suitable cauldron, used to boil the flesh of the sacrificed beast in its own paunch,[137] seems to give a glimpse of a state of things in the centre of Asia, resembling that which has continued into modern times in the remote North-East. It is thus not unlikely that the use of stone-boiling, to meet the want of suitable vessels for direct boiling over the fire, may once have had a range in Asia far beyond the Kamchatkan promontory.[138]
It may be that the more convenient boiling in vessels set over the fire was generally preceded in the world by the clumsier 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.[139] The Asiatic paunch-kettles have just been mentioned, and kettles of skins have been described among the Esquimaux,[140] and even among the wild Irish[141] 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."[142] 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,[143] 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.[144] 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 made, was that people daubed such combustible vessels as these with clay, to protect them from the fire, till they found that the clay alone would answer the purpose, and thus the art of pottery came into the world. The idea was not a mere effort of his imagination, for he had met with a description of the plastering of wooden vessels with clay in the southern Hemisphere. It is related that a certain Captain Gonneville sailed from Honfleur in 1503, doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and came to the Southern Indies (apparently the east coast of South America). There he found a gentle and joyous people, living by hunting and fishing, and a little agriculture, and he speaks of cloaks of mats and skins, feather work, bows and arrows, beds of mats, villages of thirty to eighty huts of stakes and wattles, etc., "and their household utensils of wood, even their boiling-pots, but plastered with a kind of clay, a good finger thick, which prevents the fire from burning them."[145] The theory of the origin of pottery which Goguet founded upon this remarkable account, is corroborated by a quantity of evidence which has made its appearance since his time.
The comparison of two accounts of vessels found, one among the Esquimaux, the other among their neighbours the Unalashkans (whose language contains proofs of intimate contact with them[146]), may serve to give an idea of the way in which clay may come to supersede less convenient materials, and a gradual approach be made towards the potter's art. When James Hall was in Greenland, in 1605, he found the natives boiling food over their lamps, in vessels with stone bottoms, and sides of whale's fins.[147] In Unalashka, Captain Cook found that some of the natives had got brass kettles from the Russians, but those who had not, made their own "of a flat stone, with sides of clay, not unlike a standing pye."[148] He thought it likely that they had learnt to boil from the Russians, but the Russians could hardly have taught them to make such vessels as these, and the appearance of a kettle with a stone bottom (no doubt potstone), and sides of another material, at the two opposite sides of America, gives ground for supposing it to have been in common use in high latitudes.
From the examination of an earthen vessel from the Fiji Islands, Dr. D. S. Price considers that it was very likely made by moulding clay on the outside of the shell or rind of some fruit. The vessel in question is made watertight after the South American manner by a varnish of resin. The evident and frequent adoption of gourd-shapes in the earthenware of distant parts of the world does not prove much, but as far as it goes it tells in favour of the opinion that such gourd-like vessels may be the successors of real gourds, made into pottery by a plastering of clay. Some details given in 1841 by Squier and Davis, in their account of the monuments in the Mississippi Valley, are much more to the purpose. "In some of the Southern States, it is said, the kilns, in which the ancient pottery was baked, are now occasionally to be met with. Some are represented still to contain the ware, partially burned, and retaining the rinds of the gourds, etc., over which they were modelled, and which had not been entirely removed by the fire." "Among the Indians along the Gulf, a greater degree of skill was displayed than with those on the upper waters of the Mississippi and on the lakes. Their vessels were generally larger and more symmetrical, and of a superior finish. They moulded them over gourds and other models and baked them in ovens. In the construction of those of large size, it was customary to model them in baskets of willow or splints, which, at the proper period, were burned off, leaving the vessel perfect in form, and retaining the somewhat ornamental markings of their moulds. Some of those found on the Ohio seem to have been modelled in bags or nettings of coarse thread or twisted bark. These practices are still retained by some of the remote western tribes. Of this description of pottery many specimens are found with the recent deposits in the mounds."[149] Prince Maximilian of Wied makes the following remark on some earthen vessels found in Indian mounds near Harmony, on the Wabash river:—"They were made of a sort of grey clay, marked outside with rings, and seem to have been moulded in a cloth or basket, being marked with impressions or figures of this kind."[150]
It has been thought, too, that the early pottery of Europe retains in its ornamentation traces of having once passed through a stage in which the clay was surrounded by basketwork or netting, either as a backing to support the finished vessel, or as a mould to form it in. Dr. Klemm advanced this view twenty years ago. "The imitation (of natural vessels) in clay presupposes numerous trials. In the Friendly Islands, we find vessels which are still in an early stage; they are made of clay, slightly burnt, and enclosed in plaited work; so also the oldest German vessels seem to have been, for we observe on those which remain an ornamentation in which plaiting is imitated by incised lines. What was no longer wanted as a necessity was kept up as an ornament."[151]
Dr. Daniel Wilson made a similar remark, some years later, on early British urns which, he says, "may have been strengthened by being surrounded with a platting of cords or rushes. . . . It is certain that very many of the indented patterns on British pottery have been produced by the impress of twisted cords on the wet clay,—the intentional imitation, it may be, of undesigned indentations originally made by the platted net-work on ruder urns," etc.[152] Mr. G. J. French mentions experiments made by him in support of his views on the derivation of the interlaced or guilloche ornaments on early Scottish crosses, etc., from imitation of earlier structures of wicker-work. He coated baskets with clay, and found the wicker patterns came out on all the earthen vessels thus made, and he seems to think that some ancient urns still preserved were actually moulded in this way, judging from the lip being marked as if the wicker-work had been turned in over the clay coating inside.[153]
Taken all together, the evidence of so many imperfect and seemingly transitional forms of pottery makes it probable that it was through such stages that the art grew up into the more perfect form in which we usually find it, and in which it has come to be clearly understood that clay, alone or with some mixture of sand or such matters to prevent cracking, is capable of being used without any extraneous support.
Such is the evidence by means of which I have attempted to trace the progress of mankind in three important arts, whose early history lies for the most part out of the range of direct record. Its examination brings into view a gradual improvement in methods of producing fire; the supplanting of a rude means of boiling food by a higher one; and a progress from the vessels of gourds, bark, or shell of the lower races to the pottery and metal of the higher. On the whole, progress in these useful arts appears to be the rule, and whether its steps be slow or rapid, a step once made does not seem often to be retraced.
- ↑ Plut., 'Aqua an Ignis utilior?'
- ↑ Galvano, 'Discoveries of the World;' Hakluyt Soc., London, 1862, pp. 66, 174–9, 238.
- ↑ Wilkes, 'Narr. of U. S. Exploring Exp., 1838–42;' London. 1845, vol. v. i p. 18.
- ↑ Hale, 'Ethnography, etc., of U. S. Exp.;' Philadelphia ed. vol. vi. 1846, pp. 149, 363.
- ↑ Sir G. Grey, 'Polynesian Mythology;' London, 1855, pp. 45–9.
- ↑ Turner, 'Polynesia,' pp. 527–8, and Vocab.
- ↑ Otto v. Kotzebue, 'Entdeckungs-Reise;' Weimar, 1821, vol. ii. p. 67.
- ↑ Pigafetta, 'Viaggio fatto attorno il Mondo,' 1556. Eng. Trans, in Pinkerton, vol. xi.
- ↑ Hornius, 'De Originibus Americanis;' The Hague, 1652, pp. 204, 51. See Goguet, vol. i. p. 69.
- ↑ Le Gobien, 'Histoire des Isles Marianes;' Paris, 1700, p. 44.
- ↑ Herod., iii. 16.
- ↑ Lafitau, 'Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains;' Paris, 1724, vol. i. p. 40.
- ↑ 'Lettres Édifiantes et Curieuses;' Paris, 1731, vol. xx. p. 223. Goguet, l. c.
- ↑ Mela, iii. c. 9.
- ↑ Plin., vi. 35, and see ii. 67.
- ↑ Krapf, Travels, etc., in East Africa; London, 1860, p. 51, etc. See Perty, 'Grundzüge der Ethnograpbie;' Leipzig, 1859, p. 248.
- ↑ Plin., vii. 2.
- ↑ Petherick p. 367.
- ↑ Plin., vi. 35, vii. 2.
- ↑ Backhouse, 'Australia,' p. 99.
- ↑ See Chapter XII. Mr. Calder in Journ. Anthrop. Inst. vol. iii. p. 19, accounts for the Tasmanians' non-use of the friction-apparatus by stating that the trees of the country are mostly too hard and uninflammable for the purpose. [Note to 3rd Edition.]
- ↑ 'Athenæum,' Oct. 15, 1864, p. 503.
- ↑ Angas, 'Savage Life;' vol. i. p. 112.
- ↑ Oldfield in Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. iii. p. 233. Dumont d'Urville, 'Voyage de l'Astrolabe;' vol. i. p. 95. See Sir John Lubbock's remarks on accounts of tribes without fire, or without the art of fire-making, in 'Prehistoric Times,' pp. 433. 439, 547.
- ↑ Darwin, in Narr., vol. iii. p. 488. Polack, vol. i. p. 165. Tyerman and Bennet, vol. i. p. 141. Buschmann, 'Iles Marquises,' etc.; Berlin, 1843, pp. 140-1. Mariner, Vocab., s. vv. tolo-afi, tolonga, cownatoo. S. S. Farmer, 'Tonga,' etc.: London, 1855, p. 138. Walpole, 'Four Years in the Pacific;' London, 1849, vol. ii. p. 377. Kotzebue, vol. iii. p. 154. See mention of fire made by rubbing, not drilling, two pieces of wood, in Rochefort, 'Iles Antilles,' p. 440.
- ↑ Bowring, vol. i p. 206. St. John, vol. i. p. 137. Marsden, p. 60. See Tennent, 'Ceylon,' vol. i. p. 105.
- ↑ Cook, First Voy. H., vol. iii. p. 234. Angas, S. Australia, pl. 27.
- ↑ Lubbock, p. 440.
- ↑ Marsden, p. 60.
- ↑ Kotzebue, vol. iii. p. 154.
- ↑ Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 513.
- ↑ Kracheninnikow, p. 30.
- ↑ Latham, Descr. Eth., vol. i. p. 89.
- ↑ Shortt, in Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. iii. p. 376.
- ↑ Tennent, 'Ceylon,' vol. ii. p. 451. Bailey in Tr. Eth. Soc., 1863, p. 291.
- ↑ Casalis, p. 129. Klemm, C. W., part i. p. 67. Koelle, 'Kanuri Vocab.;' p. 413.
- ↑ Glas, 'Canary Islands;' London, 1764, p. 8.
- ↑ Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 239. Schoolcraft, part i. p. 214. Loskiel, p. 70, Lafitau, ' Mœurs des Sauvages Amériquains;' Paris, 1724, vol. ii. p. 242.
- ↑ Kingsborough, Selden MS., Vatican MS.
- ↑ Brasseur, 'Popol-Vuh,' pp. 64, 218, 243.
- ↑ Oviedo, 'Hysteria General de las Indias;' Salamanca, 1547, vi. 5.
- ↑ Spix and Martius, vol. ii. p. 387, and plates. Purchas, vol. iii. p. 983; vol. iv. p. 1345. Molina, vol. ii. p. 122. Dobrizhoffer, vol. ii. p. 118. Garcilaso de la Vega, 'Commentaries Reales' (2nd ed.); Madrid, 1723, p. 198.
- ↑ Ellis, 'Madagascar,' vol. i. p. 317.
- ↑ Darwin, in Narr., vol. iii. p. 488.
- ↑ Kuhn, 'Herabkunft des Feuers,' p. 39. Hom. Od., ix. 382.
- ↑ Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 104.
- ↑ Henry Ellis, 'Voyage to Hudson's Bay;' London, 1748, pp. 132, 234.
- ↑ Sir E. Belcher, in Tr. Eth. Soc., 1861, p. 140.
- ↑ Kotzebue, vol. iii. p. 155.
- ↑ Thomson, 'New Zealand,' vol. i. p. 203.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, part iii. pl. 28. D. Wilson, 'Prehistoric Man;' vol. ii. p. 375.
- ↑ Holtzappfel, 'Turning and Mechanical Manipulation;' London, 1356, vol. ii.
- ↑ Wilkes, U. S. Exp., vol. v. p. 17.
- ↑ Turner, p. 273.
- ↑ L. H. Morgan, 'League of the Iroquois;' Rochester, U. S., 1851, p. 381.
- ↑ Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. ii. p. 418; Cameron, 'Malayan India,' p. 136.
- ↑ Cal.—"Hast thou not dropped from heaven?" ('Tempest,' act ii. scene 2.)
Cal.—. . . . . . . . . . .
"It would control my dam's god, Setebos." (Id., act. i. scene 2.) - ↑ Pigafetta, in Pinkerton, vol. xi. Their process was the simplest hand-drilling, as appears (1577-80) from the account in Drake's 'World Encompassed,' Hak. Soc. 1854, p. 48.
- ↑ W. P. Snow, 'Tierra del Fuego,' etc.; vol. ii. p. 360.
- ↑ Wallis, in Hawkesworth, vol. i. p. 171.
- ↑ Sarmiento de Gamboa, 'Viage al Estrecho de Magallanes;' Madrid, 1768, p. 229. "Y unos pedazos de pedernal, pasados, y pintados de margaxita de oro y plata: y preguntándoles que para qué era aquello? dixeron por señas, que para sacar fuego; y luego uno de ellos tomó unas plumas de las que trahía, y sirviéndole de yesca, sacó fuego con el pedernal. Paréceme que es (casca?) de metal de plata ú oro de veto, porque es al natural como el curiquixo de porco en el Pirú."
- ↑ Mackenzie, 'Voyages;' London, 1801, p. 38. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 26.
- ↑ Hayes, 'Arctic Boat Journey;' London, 1860, p. 217.
- ↑ Le Jeune, 'Relation,' etc. (1634); Paris, 1635, p. 91. Lafitau, vol. ii. p. 242.
- ↑ Billings, 'Exp. to N. Russia;' p. 159. Cook, 3rd Voy., vol. ii. p. 513. Kotzebue, vol. iii. p. 155.
- ↑ Zucchelli, 'Merkwürdige Missions-und Reise-Beschreibung nach Congo;' Frankfort, 1715, p. 344.
- ↑ Aristoph., Nubes, 757, etc.
- ↑ Pliny, xxxvi. 67, xxxvii. 10.
- ↑ Davis, vol. iii. p. 51. Bastian, 'Oestl. Asien,' vol. iii. p. 516.
- ↑ Pliny, ii. 111.
- ↑ Plutarch, 'Vita Numæ,' ix. 7.
- ↑ Festus. "Ignis Vestæ si quando interstinctus esset, virgines verberibus afficiebautur a pontificibus, quibus mos erat tabulam felicis materiæ tamdiu terebrare, quousque exceptum ignem cribro æneo virgo in sedem ferret." See Val. Max., I. i. 6.
- ↑ Garcilaso de la Vega, p. 198.
- ↑ Garcilaso de la Vega, p. 109. Compare Diego Fernandez, 'Hist. del Peru,' Seville, 1571; "y nadie podia tratar, ni conversar con estas Mamaconas. Y si alguno lo intentana, luego le interrauan biuo."
- ↑ Garcilaso de la Vega, p. 195.
- ↑ Plut. T. Quinct. Flaminius, x.
- ↑ Sarmiento, MS. cited in Prescott, Peru, vol. i. p. 25.
- ↑ Juan & Ulloa, 'Relacion Historica;' Madrid, 1748, p. 619.
- ↑ Pliny, xvi. 77.
- ↑ Pr. Max. v. Wled., 'Reise nach Brasilien' (1815—7), vol. ii. p. 19. Hyltén-Cavallius, 'Wärend och Wirdarne,' Stockholm, 1863–4, vol. i. p. 189, states that within a generation there were old foresters in districts of Sweden who could still practise the ancient art of making fire by violently twirling a dry oak stick with their hands against a dry piece of wood. See also the account of the gnid-eld or "rubbing-fire," which was carried over the land as "need-fire." [Note to 3rd Edition.]
- ↑ Goguet, vol. iii. p. 321. See Kuhn, p. 28, etc.
- ↑ Euseb., Præp. Evang. i. x.
- ↑ Kuhn, p. 110.
- ↑ Stevenson, Sama Veda, p. 7.
- ↑ If so, the upper and lower blocks may be the upper and lower arani, and the the pramantha, or ćâtra. See Kuhn, pp. 13, 15, 73; also Boehtlingk and Roth, s. v. arani, ćâtra. The anointing with butter (Kuhn, p. 78), corresponds to the use of train oil by the Esquimaux.
- ↑ Kuhn, 'Hera kunft des Feuers,' etc., pp. 36—40, citing Theophrastus, Hesychius, Simplicius, Festus, etc.
- ↑ Grimm, D. M., p. 570. Cord fire-drill used as toy in Switzerland, ibid. p. 573.
- ↑ Grimm, D. M., pp. 570—9. See ante, p. 253, note.
- ↑ Kuhn, p. 45. Wuttke, 'Deutscher Volksaberglaube;' Hamburg, 1860, p. 92. Brand, vol. iii. p. 286.
- ↑ Brand, 'Popular Antiquities;' London, 1853, vol. i. p. 157.
- ↑ Kelly, 'Curiosities of European Tradition,' p. 47.
- ↑ Cap. Carlomanni in Grimm, D. M., p. 570.
- ↑ Grimm, D. M., pp. 570, 579. See also Migne, Lex s. v. "Nedifri."
- ↑ P. L. le Roy, 'Erzählung der Begebenheiten,' etc.; Riga, 1760. (An E. Tr. in Pinkerton, vol. i.)
- ↑ It seems by a passage in Boturini (p. 18), that he had some reason to think they used flint to strike fire with, and if so, as they had no iron, they probably used pyrites.
- ↑ Mouat, p.308.
- ↑ Klemm, C. G., vol. iii. p. 222. Moffat, Missionary Labours, etc., in S. Africa; London, 1842, p. 521.
- ↑ Ellis, Madagascar, vol. i. p. 72.
- ↑ Barker-Webb and Berthelot, vol. i. part i. p. 134.
- ↑ Maury, 'La Terre & l'Homme;' Paris, 1857, p. 572.
- ↑ Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 26; vol. iv. p. 120. FitzRoy, in Tr. Eth. Soc., 1861, p. 4.
- ↑ Cook, 1st Voy. H., vol. iii. p. 233. Lang, p. 347. Grey, Journals, vol. i. p. 176; vol. ii. p. 274. Klemm, C. G., vol. i. p. 307. Eyre, vol. ii. p. 289.
- ↑ Lery, Hist. d'un Voy., etc., 1600, p. 153. Southey, Brazil, vol. i. p. 216; vol. iii. pp. 337, 361. The word boucan seems connected with that now commonly used in Brazil. "Mocaém, donde fisemos moquem, assar na labareda." Dias Dic. da Lingua Tupy.
- ↑ Wallace, p. 220. Humboldt and Bonpland, vol. ii. p. 556. Purchas, vol. v. p. 899.
- ↑ Hakluyt, vol. iii. p. 307.
- ↑ Tschudi, 'Peru,' vol. ii. p. 202.
- ↑ Dampier, vol ii. part i. p. 90.
- ↑ Burton, 'Central Africa,' vol. ii. p. 282. Kracheninnikow, p. 46. Dampier, vol. iii. part ii. p. 24. Keate, p. 203. See Earl, 'Papuans,' p. 165.
- ↑ Catlin, vol. i. p. 54.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, part ii. p. 176.
- ↑ Charlevoix, vol. vi. p. 47.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, part i. p. 81.
- ↑ Harmon, p. 323.
- ↑ Mackenzie, p. 37, and see p. 207.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, part i. p. 211.
- ↑ Schoolcraft, part iii. pp. 107, 146.
- ↑ Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 321. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. pp. 26, 69.
- ↑ Belcher, in Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. i. 1861, p. 133.
- ↑ Kracheninnikow, p. 30. Erman, Reise, vol. iii. p. 423.
- ↑ Baines, in Anthrop. Rev., July, 1866, p. civ.
- ↑ Cook, First Voy. H., vol. iii. p. 55; also Third Voy., vol. i. p. 158.
- ↑ Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 132.
- ↑ Thomson, 'New Zealand,' vol. i. p. 160.
- ↑ Yate, p. 43.
- ↑ Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 49; vol. i. p. 233. Second Voy., vol. i. p. 310. First Voy. H., vol. ii. p. 254.
- ↑ Tyerman & Bennet, vol. i. p. 493.
- ↑ Wallis, H., vol. i. pp. 246, 264.
- ↑ Kotzebue, vol. ii. pp. 47, 65.
- ↑ Cook, Second Voy., vol. I. p. 214; vol. ii. p. 105. Third Voy., vol. i. p. 375. Klemm, C. G., vol. iv. p. 272. Williams, 'Fiji,' vol. i. p. 69. Turner, p. 424. Mariner, vol. ii. p. 272. Keate, p. 336.
- ↑ Linnæus, Tour, vol. ii. p. 231. Such beer, called Steinbir, is made in Carinthia, by throwing hot stones into the vat. See W. O. Stanley, 'Memoirs on Ancient Dwellings in Holyhead,' p. 19. [Note to 3rd Edition.]
- ↑ J. Evans, in Archæologia, vol. xli.
- ↑ Dr. Hooker found baths of hollowed trees at Bhomsong, heated with hot stones, 'Himalayan Journals,' vol. i. p. 305. Compare a similar process in N. W. America, Tr. Eth. Soc., vol. iv. p. 290.
- ↑ E. Ysbrants Ides, 'Reize naar China;' Amsterdam, 1710, p. 27.
- ↑ Mackenzie, p. 207.
- ↑ Erman (E. Tr.), vol. ii. pp. 456, 467.
- ↑ Kracheninnikow, p. 142.
- ↑ Herod., iv. 61.
- ↑ The frequent use of wicker baskets for holding liquids, in Africa, may have a bearing on the history of stone-boiling. See mention of hot stones for melting or boiling fat, in Bleek, 'Reynard in Africa,' pp. 8–10.
- ↑ Cranz, p. 73; Linnæus, vol. i. p. 356; Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 266. Mem. Anthrop. Soc. vol. i. 1863–4, pp. 297–8.
- ↑ Martin Frobisher, in 'Hakluyt,' vol. iii. pp. 66, 95.
- ↑ Evans, l. c.
- ↑ 'Rerum Scoticarum Historia, auctore Georgio Buchanano Scoto;' (ad ex.) Edinburgh, 1528, p. 7.
- ↑ Spix and Martius, vol. ii. p. 688. Wallace, p. 508.
- ↑ St. John, vol. i. p. 137. Marsden, p. 60. Mouhot, vol. ii. p. 245. Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii p. 35. See Coleman, p. 318; Mariner, vol. ii. p. 272.
- ↑ Goguet, vol. i. p. 77. 'Mémoires touchant l'Établissement d'une Mission Chrestienne dans le troisième monde, autrement appellé la Terre Australe,' etc.; Paris, 1663, pp. 10–16.
- ↑ Buschmann, Azt. Spr., p. 702.
- ↑ Purchas, vol. iii. p. 817.
- ↑ Cook, Third Voy., vol. ii. p. 510.
- ↑ Squier & Davis, pp. 195, 187. See the account in J. D. Hunter, 'Memoirs of Captivity among the Indians,' London, 1823, p. 239; also Rau, 'Indian Pottery,' in Smithsonian Report, 1866.
- ↑ Pr. Max. Vovage, vol. i. p. 192. Klemm, C. G., vol. ii. p. 66.
- ↑ Klemm, C. G., vol. i. p. 188.
- ↑ Wilson, Archæology, etc., of Scotland, p. 289.
- ↑ G. J. French, An Attempt, etc.; Manchester (printed), 1858.