l object now and
then offer points that one can fasten upon. It is quite another thing when
we have to deal with actual decoration which does not aim at anything
further than at employing the structural laws of organisms in order to
organize the unwieldy substance, to endow the stone with a higher vitality.
These latter forms depart, even at the time when they originate, very
considerably from the natural objects. The successors of the originators
soon still further modify them by adapting them to particular purposes,
combining and fusing them with other forms so as to produce particular
individual forms which have each their own history (_e.g._, the acanthus
ornament, which, in its developed form, differs very greatly from the
acanthus plant itself); and in a wider sense we may here enumerate all such
forms as have been raised by art to the dignity of perfectly viable beings,
_e.g._, griffins, sphinxes, dragons, and angels.

[Illustration: Fig. 5.]

The deciphering and derivation of such forms as these is naturally
enough more difficult; in the case of most of them we are not even in
possession of the most necessary preliminaries to the investigation, and
in the case of others there are very important links missing (_e.g._,
for the well-known Greek palmettas). In proportion as the representation
of the plant was a secondary object, the travesty has been more and more
complete. As in the case of language, where the root is hardly
recognizable in the later word, so in decorative art the original form
is indistinguishable in the ornament. The migration of races and the
early commercial intercourse between distant lands have done much to
bring about the fusion of types; but again in contrast to this we find,
in the case of extensive tracts of country, notably in the Asiatic
continent, a fixity, throughout centuries, of forms that have once been
introduced, which occasions a confusion between ancient and modern works
of art, and renders investigations much more difficult. An old French
traveler writes: "J'ai vu dans le tresor d'Ispahan les vetements de
Tamerlan; ils ne different en rien de ceux d'aujourd'hui." Ethnology,
the natural sciences, and last, but not least, the history of technical
art are here set face to face with great problems.

[Illustration: FIG. 6.]

In the case in point, the study of the first group of artistic forms that
have been elaborated by Western art leads to definite results, because the
execut