of the potter by the primitive marks of the old
basketwork. But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into
his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the flint
knife itself, with which he incised more regular patterns, straight or
zigzag lines, rows of dots, squares and triangles, concentric circles,
and even the mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn
and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct imitation of
plant or animal forms; once only, on a single specimen from a Swiss lake
dwelling, are the stem and veins of a leaf dimly figured on the
handiwork of the European prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form,
as pattern merely, had begun to exist; imitative work as such was yet
unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere.

In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten people who built the
mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli of the Mississippi valley decorated
their pottery not only with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs,
and turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of them evidently
modelled from the life, and some of them quite unmistakably genuine
portraits. On one such vase, found in Arkansas, and figured by the
Marquis de Nadaillac in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the
ornamentation consists (in true Red Indian taste) of skeleton hands,
interspersed with crossbones; and the delicacy and anatomical
correctness of the detail inevitably suggest the idea that the unknown
artist must have worked with the actual hand of his slaughtered enemy
lying for a model on the table before him. Much of the early American
pottery is also coloured as well as figured, and that with considerable
real taste; the pigments were applied, however, after the baking, and so
possess little stability or permanence of character. But pots and vases
of these advanced styles have got so far ahead of the first potter that
we have really little or no business with them in this paper.

Prehistoric European pottery has never a spout, but it often indulges in
some simple form of ear or handle. The very ancient British bowl from
Bavant Long Barrow--produced by that old squat Finnlike race which
preceded the 'Ancient Britons' of our old-fashioned school-books--has
two ear-shaped handles projecting just below the rim, exactly as in the
modern form of vessel known as a crock, and still familiarly used for
household purposes. This long survival