When we see the reasonable probability that the architecture, the primeval arts and industries, and the culture of the Pueblos are mainly indigenous to the desert and semi-desert regions of North America, we are in the way towards an understanding of the origin and remarkable degree of development in the ceramic art. In these regions water not only occurs in small quantities, but is obtainable only at points separated by great distances, hence to the Pueblos the first necessity of life is the transportation and preservation of water. The skins and paunches of animals could be used in the effort to meet this want with but small success, as the heat and aridity of the atmosphere would in a short time render water thus kept unfit for use, and the membranes once empty would be liable to destruction by drying. So far as language indicates the character of the earliest water vessels which to any extent met the requirements of the Zuñi ancestry, they were tubes of wood or sections of canes. The latter, in ritualistic recitation, are said to have been the receptacles that the creation-priests filled with the sacred water from the ocean of the cave-wombs of earth, whence men and creatures were born, and the name for one of these cane water vessels is _shó tom me_, from _shó e_, cane or canes, and _tóm me_, a wooden tube. Yet, although in the extreme western borders of the deserts, which were probably the first penetrated by the Pueblos, the cane grows to great size and in abundance along the two rivers of that country, its use, if ever extensive, must have speedily given way to the use of gourds, which grew luxuriantly at these places and were of better shapes and of larger capacity. The name of the gourd as a vessel is _shoṕ tom me_, from _shó e_, canes, _pó pon nai e_, bladder-shaped, and _tóm me_, a wooden tube; a seeming derivation (with the exception of the interpolated sound significant of form) from _shó tom me_. The gourd itself is called _mó thlâ â_, "hard fruit." The inference is that when used as a vessel, and called _shoṕĭ tom me_, it must have been named after an older form of vessel, instead of after the plant or fruit which produced it.