rue artist (Fig. 14). The design is like a hasty memorandum of
Leech's. Then compare the stiff formality of the modern Eskimo drawing
(Fig. 13). It is rather like a record, a piece of picture-writing,
than a free sketch, a rapid representation of what is most
characteristic in nature. Clearly, if the Eskimo come from palaeolithic
man, they are a degenerate race as far as art is concerned. Yet, as
may be seen in Dr. Rink's books, the Eskimo show considerable skill
when they have become acquainted with European methods and models, and
they have at any rate a greater natural gift for design than the Red
Indians, of whose sacred art the Thunder-bird brooding over page 298
is a fair example. The Red Men believe in big birds which produce
thunder. Quahteaht, the Adam of Vancouver's Island, married one, and
this (Fig. 11) is she.

[Illustration: Fig. 14.--Palaeolithic Sketch: a Reindeer.]

We have tried to show how savage decorative art supplied the first
ideas of patterns which were developed in various ways by the
decorative art of advancing civilisation. The same progress might be
detected in representative art. Books, like the guide-book to ancient
Greece which Pausanias wrote before the glory had quite departed,
prove that the Greek temples were museums in which the development of
art might be clearly traced. Furthest back in the series of images of
gods came things like that large stone which was given to Cronus when
he wished to swallow his infant child Zeus, and which he afterwards
vomited up with his living progeny. This fetich-stone was preserved at
Delphi. Next came wild bulks of beast-headed gods, like the
horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia, and it seems possible enough that
there was an Artemis with the head of a she-bear. Gradually the
bestial characteristics dropped, and there appeared such rude
anthropomorphic images of Apollo--more like South Sea idols than the
archer prince--as are now preserved in Athens. Next we have the stage
of semi-savage realism, which is represented by the metopes of Selinus
in Sicily, now in the British Museum, and by not a few gems and pieces
of gold work. Greek temples have fallen, and the statues of the gods
exist only in scattered fragments. But in the representative
collection of casts belonging to the Cambridge Archaeological Museum,
one may trace the career of Greek art backwards from Phidias to the
rude idol.

[Illustration: Fig. 15.--Archaic Greek Gems.]

'Savage realism'