e its recognition is rendered somewhat more difficult. The blank
expansion of the leaf is not quite unrelieved by ornament, but is set off
with small points, spots, and blossoms. This will be thought less strange
if we reflect on the Eastern representations of animals, in the portrayal
of which the flat expanses produced by the muscle-layers are often treated
from a purely decorative point of view, which strikes us as an exaggeration
of convention.

[Illustration: FIG. 3.]

One cannot go wrong in taking for granted that plant-forms were the
archetypes of all these patterns. Now we know that it holds good, as a
general principle in the history of civilization, that the tiller of the
ground supplants the shepherd, as the shepherd supplants the hunter; and
the like holds also in the history of the branch of art we are
discussing--representations of animals are the first to make their
appearance, and they are at this period remarkable for a wonderful
sharpness of characterization. At a later stage man first begins to exhibit
a preference for plant-forms as subjects for representation, and above all
for such as can in any way be useful or hurtful to him. We, however, meet
such plant-forms used in ornament in the oldest extant monuments of art in
Egypt, side by side with representations of animals; but the previous
history of this very developed culture is unknown. In such cases as afford
us an opportunity of studying more primitive though not equally ancient
stages of culture, as for instance among the Greeks, we find the above
dictum confirmed, at any rate in cases where we have to deal with the
representation of the indigenous flora as contradistinguished from such
representations of plants as were imported from foreign civilizations. In
the case that is now to occupy us, we have not to go back so very far in
the history of the world.

[Illustration: FIG. 4.]

The ornamental representations of plants are of two kinds. Where we have to
deal with a simple pictorial reproduction of plants as symbols (laurel
branches, boughs of olive and fir, and branches of ivy), _i. e._, with a
mere characteristic decoration of a technical structure, stress is laid
upon the most faithful reproduction of the object possible--the artist is
again and again referred to the study of Nature in order to imitate her.
Hence, as a general rule, there is less difficulty in the explanation of
these forms, because even the minute details of the natura