Fire as an agent in human culture / by Walter Hough.

  • Walter Hough
Date:
1926
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fire as an agent in human culture / by Walter Hough. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    39/338 (page 15)
    The application of fire to bodily wants, expressed in warming the body or parts of the body and the house, falls into the classes indi¬ vidual, family, and collective, as follows: HEATING Application of fire to bodily wants Warming the body and house_ Individual Family_ .Collective_< Hand stove, foot stove, pocket stove. Fire pot. Family fire. Brazier, stove lamp. Fireplace. Hot-air furnaces Water. Steam. Gas. Electricity. As a preliminary remark, the use of fire extemporaneously for warming presents many instances regarded as unusual and not fall¬ ing in line with established customs or presenting features of devel¬ opment from anterior sources. One of these curiosities in the use of fire was told the writer in 1900 by Dr. Edward Palmer, who said that the Cocopa Indians on the road in winter build a fire on the sand for the purpose of heating it. When the sand is heated they dig a hole beneath the place where the first was set, crawl in the hole and, drawing back the warm sand over themselves, sleep comfortably during the night. Another instance, somewhat less ingenious, is given by Rockhill: “We passed several Mongol shepherds carrying about on the end of a stick a smouldering bit of dry dung. Now and then they used it to light a bunch of grass and warm themselves by the blaze.”44 In the line of development the fireplace comes before the usages in which small portions of fire were inclosed in various ways for special purposes. This specialization of uses of fire has grown enor¬ mously from small beginnings, and furnishes an interesting group of objects reflecting various periods and customs. Standing first in simplicity in applying heat to the body or parts of the body are the methods taking advantage of the retention of heat by various substances. One of the curiosities of the Tradescant Museum, an institution founded in the seventeenth century and pro¬ genitor of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, was “a brazen ball to warme ye nunnes hands,” as the old catalogue quaintly phrases it. If this brazen ball was solid metal and not a hot-water container it is in advance of the often extemporaneous stones, hot bricks, and flat irons, which no doubt have had long use and which probably will never 14 W. W. Rockhill. Journey Through Mongolia and Tibet, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 1894, p. 35.