ssesses all
the social conditions that produce this art is a fact worth noticing,
and itself proves that the native art of one of the most backward
races we know is not essentially imitative.

[Illustration: Fig. 2.]

Any one who will look through a collection of Australian weapons and
utensils will be brought to this conclusion. The shields and the clubs
are elaborately worked, but almost always without any representation
of plants, animals, or the human figure. As a rule the decorations
take the simple shape of the 'herring-bone' pattern, or such other
patterns as can be produced without the aid of spirals, or curves, or
circles. There is a natural and necessary cause of this choice of
decoration. The Australians, working on hard wood, with tools made of
flint, or broken glass, or sharp shell, cannot easily produce any
curved lines. Every one who, when a boy, carved his name on the bark
of a tree, remembers the difficulty he had with S and G, while he got
on easily with letters like M and A, which consist of straight or
inclined lines. The savage artist has the same difficulty with his
rude tools in producing anything like satisfactory curves or
spirals. We engrave above (Fig. 1) a shield on which an Australian has
succeeded, with obvious difficulty, in producing concentric ovals of
irregular shape. It may be that the artist would have produced perfect
circles if he could. His failure is exactly like that of a youthful
carver of inscriptions coming to grief over his G's and S's. Here,
however (Fig. 2), we have three shields which, like the ancient Celtic
pipkin (the tallest of the three figures in Fig. 3), show the earliest
known form of savage decorative art--the forms which survive under the
names of 'chevron' and 'herring-bone.' These can be scratched on clay
with the nails, or a sharp stick, and this primeval way of decorating
pottery made without the wheel survives, with other relics of savage
art, in the western isles of Scotland. The Australian had not even
learned to make rude clay pipkins, but he decorated his shields as the
old Celts and modern old Scotch women decorated their clay pots, with
the herring-bone arrangement of incised lines. In the matter of colour
the Australians prefer white clay and red ochre, which they rub into
the chinks in the woodwork of their shields. When they are determined
on an ambush, they paint themselves all over with white, justly
conceiving that their sudden apparition in th