mes did not permit the growth in northern latitudes of such large
natural vessels as gourds, calabashes, bamboos, or coco-nuts. In all
probability the horns of the aurochs and the wild cattle, and the
capacious skull of the fellow-man whose bones he had just picked at his
ease for his cannibal supper, formed the aboriginal goblets and basins
of the old black European savage. A curious verbal relic of the use of
horns as drinking-cups survives indeed down to almost modern times in
the Greek word _keramic_, still commonly applied to the art of pottery,
and derived, of course, from _keras_, a horn; while as to skulls, not
only were they frequently used as drinking-cups by our Scandinavian
ancestors, but there still exists a very singular intermediate American
vessel in which the clay has actually been moulded on a human skull as
model, just as other vessels have been moulded on calabashes or other
suitable vegetable shapes.

Still, the balance of evidence certainly seems to show that a little
very rude and almost shapeless hand-made pottery has really been
discovered amongst the buried caves where palaeolithic men made for ages
their chief dwelling-places. Fragments of earthenware occurred in the
Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer,
cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled,
a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those
identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his
possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel,
from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that
moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked
earthenware. That is the great merit of pottery, viewed as an historical
document; it retains its shape and peculiarities unaltered through
countless centuries, for the future edification of unborn antiquaries.
_Litera scripta manet_, and so does baked pottery. The hand itself that
formed that rude bowl has long since mouldered away, flesh and bone
alike, into the soil around it; but the print of its fingers, indelibly
fixed by fire into the hardened clay, remains for us still to tell the
story of that early triumph of nascent keramics.

The relics of palaeolithic pottery are, however, so very fragmentary, and
the circumstances under which they have been discovered so extremely
doubtful, that many cautious and sceptical antiquarians will even now
have nothing to say