are set with perfect taste
upon fields or within borders of elaborate geometric design. If we
should ask how such motives came to be employed in ceramic decoration,
the answer would be given that they were selected and employed because
they were regarded as fitting and beautiful by a race of decorators
whose taste is well nigh infallible. But this explanation, however
satisfactory as applied to individual examples of modern art, is not
at all applicable to primitive art, for the mind of man was not
primarily conscious of the beauty or fitness of decorative elements,
nor did he think of using them independently of the art to which they
were indigenous. Now the ceramic art gives rise to comparatively few
elements of decoration, and must therefore acquire the great body of
its decorative motives from other arts by some process not primarily
dependent upon the exercise of judgment or taste, and yet not by
direct inheritance, as the techniques of the two arts are wholly
distinct.

Textile and fictile arts are, in their earlier stages, to a large
extent, vessel making arts, the one being functionally the offshoot of
the other. The textile art is the parent, and, as I have already
shown, develops within itself a geometric system of ornament. The
fictile art is the offshoot and has within itself no predilection for
decoration. It is dependent and plastic. Its forms are to a great
extent modeled and molded within the textile shapes and acquire
automatically some of the decorative surface characters of the mold.
This is the beginning of the transfer, and as time goes on other
methods are suggested by which elements indigenous to the one art are
transferred to the other. Thus we explain the occurrence, the constant
recurrence of certain primary decorative motives in primitive
ceramics. The herring bone, the checker, the guilloche, and the like
are greatly the heritage of the textile art. Two forms derived from
textile surfaces are illustrated in Figs. 351 and 352. In the first
example shown, herring bone patterns appear as the result of textile
combination, and in the second a triangular checker is produced in the
same way. In Fig. 352 we see the result of copying these patterns in
incised lines upon soft clay.

[Illustration: FIG. 351. Herring bone and checker patterns produced in
textile combinations.]

[Illustration: FIG. 352. Herring bone and checker figures in fictile
forms transferred from the textile.]

Again, the anc