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. Bit by
bit the invention grew, like all great inventions, without any inventor.
Thus the question of the date of the first potter practically resolves
itself into the simpler question of the date of the earliest known
pottery.

Did palaeolithic man, that antique naked crouching savage who hunted the
mammoth, the reindeer, and the cave-bear among the frozen fields of
interglacial Gaul and Britain--did palaeolithic man himself, in his rude
rock-shelters, possess a knowledge of the art of pottery? That is a
question which has been much debated amongst archaeologists, and which
cannot even now be considered as finally settled before the tribunal of
science. He must have drunk out of something or other, but whether he
drank out of earthenware cups is still uncertain. It is pretty clear
that the earliest drinking vessels used in Europe were neither bowls of
earthenware nor shells of fruits, for the cold climate of interglacial
ti