art has done
little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to
untutored races.

It has been shown that the art which aims at decoration is better
adapted to both the purposes and materials of savages than the art
which aims at representation. As a rule, the materials of the lower
savages are their own bodies (which they naturally desire to make
beautiful for ever by tattooing), and the hard substances of which
they fashion their tools and weapons. These hard substances, when
worked on with cutting instruments of stone or shell, are most easily
adorned with straight cut lines, and spirals are therefore found to
be, on the whole, a comparatively late form of ornament.

[Illustration: Fig. 7.--Bushman Dog.]

We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent. Here,
again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the
materials which are at his service. His pictures have a practical
purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily,
to consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake. In modern
art, in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by
painting or sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born
instinct. But there must be some 'reason why' for this; and it does
not seem at all unlikely that we inherit the love, the disinterested
love, of imitative art from very remote ancestors, whose habits of
imitation had a direct, interested and practical purpose. The member
of Parliament who mimics the crowing of a cock during debate, or the
street boy who beguiles his leisure by barking like a dog, has a
disinterested pleasure in the exercise of his skill; but advanced
thinkers seem pretty well agreed that the first men who imitated the
voices of dogs, and cocks, and other animals, did not do so merely for
fun, but with the practical purpose of indicating to their companions
the approach of these creatures. Such were the rude beginnings of
human language; and whether that theory be correct or not, there are
certainly practical reasons which impel the savage to attempt
imitative art. I doubt if there are many savage races which do not use
representative art for the purposes of writing--that is, to
communicate information to persons whom they cannot reach by the
voice, and to assist the memory, which, in a savage, is perhaps not
very strong. To take examples. A savage man meets a savage maid. She
does not speak his language, nor he hers