of a common domestic shape from
the most remote prehistoric antiquity to our own time is very
significant and very interesting. Many of the old British pots have also
a hole or two holes pierced through them, near the top, evidently for
the purpose of putting in a string or rope by way of a handle. With the
round barrows, which belong to the Bronze Age, and contain the remains
of a later and more civilised Celtic population, we get far more
advanced forms of pottery. Burial here is preceded by cremation, and the
ashes are enclosed in urns, many of which are very beautiful in form and
exquisitely decorated. Cremation, as Professor Rolleston used feelingly
to plead, is bad for the comparative anatomist and ethnographer, but it
is passing well for the collector of pottery. Where burning exists as a
common practice, there urns are frequent, and pottery an art in great
request. Drinking-cups and perforated incense burners accompany the
dead in the round barrows; but the use of the potter's wheel is still
unknown, and all the urns and vases belonging to this age are still
hand-moulded.

It is a curious reflection, however, that in spite of all the later
improvements in the fictile art--in spite of wheels and moulds, pastes
and glazes, stamps and pigments, and all the rest of it--the most
primitive methods of the first potter are still in use in many
countries, side by side with the most finished products of modern
European skill and industry. I have in my own possession some West
Indian calabashes, cut and decorated under my own eye by a Jamaican
negro for his personal use, and bought from him by me for the smallest
coin there current--calabashes carved round the edge through the rind
with a rude string-course, exactly like the common rope pattern of
prehistoric pottery. I have seen the same Jamaican negroes kneading
their hand-made porous earthenware beside a tropical stream, moulding it
on fruits or shaping it inside with a free sweep of the curved hand, and
drying it for use in the hot sun, or baking it in a hastily-formed kiln
of plastered mud into large coarse jars of prehistoric types, locally
known by the quaint West African name of 'yabbas.' Many of these yabbas,
if buried in the ground and exposed to damp and frost, till they almost
lost the effects of the baking, would be quite indistinguishable, even
by the skilled archaeologist, from the actual handicraft of the
palaeolithic potter. The West Indian negroes brough