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."[1] 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."[2] 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,[3] and the same thing has been noticed among the Reindeer Koriaks.[4] 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,[5] 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.[6]
It may be that the more convenient boiling in vessels set over the fire was generally preceded in the world by the clumsier
- ↑ 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.
