The corn-cracker of the Pequea Indians found on the Potomac River much resembles that shown in Figure 7. The double-chambered ancient implement shown in Figure io was found by Schooleraft near the site of the present city of It is of the cornutiferous limestone of West ern New York.
Figure r5 shows the pounding maize by suspending the stone pestle from the limb of a tree, as practised by the Pennacooks of the Merrimac Valley, in New Hampshire. The pestle, commonly ornamented with the head of a man or of a quadruped, was neatly carved from gray wacke or compact sandstone, the mortar being also of the same material.
Mortars—mostly made of hard sandstone—from 5 to 24 inches in diam eter and from 2 to 12 inches in depth, of rude workmanship and without ornament, have been found in great numbers in graves in Santa Barbara, California. Specimens of the larger kind, found in graves at La Patera, are symmetrical in shape and have within and without a well-marked projecting rim, which served both to strengthen the utensil and to prevent the escape of the grain while being pounded. When broken, they were mended with asphaltum, which was also used to fasten ornaments to the rim. Many of the pestles found are simply smooth elongated boulders, while others show a shaping for a purpose, the collar on the smaller end suggesting a provision for suspension, as by the Pennacooks, above men tioned, or to facilitate handling.
In the latitude of 42° 25' on the north-west coast of America pestles of different shapes are frequently found, but the absence of mortars sug gests that in early times, as at present, the pestles were mostly used to crush acorns on flat stones, around which were placed low bottomless bas kets, each about r feet in diameter, into which were thrown the acorns to be crushed.
Hunter, in his illanners•and Customs of Indian Tribes, informs us that in some Indian villages visited by him there were employed for pounding corn one or two large stone mortars, which were public property. These
were placed in a central part of the village, and were used in rotation by the different families.
The Latimer Collection of Antiquities from Porto Rieo, in the National Museum, at Washington, includes mealing instruments in great variety. Some of the pestles have a burnished, oily appearance on the lower end. One is rough and bell-shaped, with a rude human face on the top (f. t3); others are cylindrical, colloidal, oblong, or flat. The lower stones are hemi spherical and bowl-shaped, oblong, dish-shaped, or deeply concave; one, a very beautiful and unique specimen, is a boat-shaped mortar or dish, sharp at each end and deeply concave.
In Figure ii is represented a mortar and pestle used by the Ainos of Yezo, one of the Japan islands, which is not well suited to rice-growing, but which produces wheat, and therefore requires mills to prepare the grain for food. This mill is figured in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, by Isa bella L. Bird, who visited this island in IS7S.
"The door of every country-house in Cuba, be it dwelling or bode a, is ornamented by the unattractive but useful coffee-mortar, with its clumsy wooden pestle, and a sieve made of pita caruja hangs by its side, in which the contents of the mortar are tossed in the wind and the light husks blown away, leaving the firm, hard berry " (McHatton-Ripley).
Thus far we have considered a variety of primitive appliances for grinding grain by hand alone, embracing the rude utensils for hammer ing it out on a rock with a cobble-stone and the various gradations of nat ural and artificial mortars and pestles, as also the implements employed in the weary band-process of roller-mashing. The ancient corn-mill and the modern mealing-implement scarcely differ in their construction or opera tion, while the drudgery of grinding has always devolved upon women. We shall next consider the development of those methods whose employ ment has materially lessened labor, and which at the same time have pro duced far more satisfactory results.