Reason supplies an easy solution of the problem, but one not likely to occur to the unreasoning man of the primitive world. “On the day,” says Jacquemart, “when man, walking upon the clayey soil, softened by inundations or rain, first observed that the earth retained the prints of his footsteps, the plastic art was discovered; and when lighting a fire to warm his limbs or to cook his food, he remarked that the surface of the hearth changed its nature and its color, that the reddened clay became sonorous, impervious, and hardened in its new shape, the art was revealed to him of making vessels fit to contain liquids.” The reason of the nineteenth century conflicts strangely with old-world opinions of what was due to beneficent deity. Of this we can easily find abundant illustration. Let us take, as examples, China, Japan, Egypt, and Greece. We will find that each reverts to the misty boundary between legend and history, or to the earlier age when the gods had not deserted the world--the horizon of mortal vision or fancy, where heaven seems to touch earth. It is said that nearly two thousand seven hundred years before the Christian era the potter’s art was discovered in China by Kouen-ou. This was during the reign of the enlightened Emperor Hoang-ti. Of him it is recorded that after many labors for the good of his subjects, the amelioration of their condition, and the extension of their knowledge, he was translated to the upper sphere on the back of a huge and whiskered dragon. The Japanese follow a precisely similar course. Having no real knowledge, they call imagination to their aid, and solve an historical problem by the creation of a legend. Turning back to a period long before history begins, they affect to find the inventor of pottery in Oosei-tsumi, a legendary being who lived in the age of Oanamuchi-no-mikoto, and conferred upon him the title of “Kami,” distinctive of deity. The Egyptians, more reverently, gave the art directly to the gods. Having a pantheon, they merely singled out that one of its occupants to whom the honor should be ascribed. As Osiris is their Bacchus, and Thoth their Mercury, so to the director Num, the first creature, they ascribe the art of moulding clay. Like the Hebrew Jehovah, he first made the heavens and earth, the firmament, the sun, and the moon, and, from the fact of his having made the rivers and mountains, would appear also to have evolved order out of the Egyptian chaos. Lastly, he made man. Turning the clay of the Nile upon his wheel, he fashioned the last and greatest of created things, and having “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” made man the cornerstone of the fabric of creation. Inspiration and monotheism apart, it would almost appear that the Jewish law-giver found in the hated “house of bondage” a foundation for his cosmogony.