Along the Gulf of Mexico gourds were also used to give shape
to the pot; and all over the world, even to this day, the gourd form is
a very common one for pottery of all sorts, thus pointing back, dimly
and curiously, to the original mode in which fictile ware generally
came to be invented. In Fiji and in many parts of Africa vessels
modelled upon natural forms are still universal. Of course all such pots
as these are purely hand-made; the invention of the potter's wheel, now
so indissolubly associated in all our minds with the production of
earthenware, belongs to an infinitely later and almost modern period.
And that consideration naturally suggests the fundamental question, When
did the first potter live? The world (as Sir Henry Taylor has oracularly
told us) knows nothing of its greatest men; and the very name of the
father of all potters has been utterly forgotten in the lapse of ages.
Indeed, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, one may reasonably doubt
whether there was ever actually any one single man on whom one could
definitely lay one's finger, and say with confidence, Here we have the
first potter. Pottery, no doubt, like most other things, grew by
imperceptible degrees from wholly vague and rudimentary beginnings. Just
as there were steam-engines before Watt, and locomotives before
Stephenson, so there were pots before the first potter. Many men must
have discovered separately, by half-unconscious trials, that a coat of
mud rudely plastered over the bottom of a calabash prevented it from
catching fire and spilling its contents; other men slowly learned to
plaster the mud higher and ever higher up the sides; and yet others
gradually introduced and patented new improvements for wholly encasing
the entire cup in an inch thickness of carefully kneaded clay.
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