II.] THE METAL AGES. 23 



Wildenroth, Upper Bavaria, is described by Prof. Virchow as long- 

 headed, with a cranial capacity of no less than 1585 c.c., strongly 

 developed occiput, very high and narrow face and nose, and in 

 every respect a superb specimen of the regular-featured, long- 

 headed North European 1 . 



Their works, found in great abundance in the graves, especially 

 of the Bronze and Iron periods, but a detailed account of which 

 belongs to the province of archaeology, interest us in many ways. 

 The painted earthenware vases and incised metal-ware of all kinds 

 enable the student to follow the progress of the arts of design and 

 ornamentation in their upward development from the first tenta- 

 tive efforts of the prehistoric artist at pleasing effects. Human and 

 animal figures, though rarely depicted, occasionally afford a curious 

 insight into the customs and fashions of the times. On a clay 

 vessel, found in 1896 at Lahse in Posen, is figured a regular hunt- 

 ing scene, where we see men mounted on horseback, or else on 

 foot, armed with bow and arrow, pursuing the quarry (nobly- 

 antlered stags), and returning to the penthouse after the chase 2 . 

 The drawing is extremely primitive, but on that account all the 

 more instructive, showing in connection with analogous representa- 

 tions on contemporary objects, how in prehistoric art such figures 

 tend to become conventionalised and purely ornamental, as in 

 similar designs on the vases and textiles from the Ancon Necro- 

 polis, Peru. " Most ornaments of primitive peoples, although to 

 our eye they may seem merely geometrical and freely-invented 

 designs, are in reality nothing more than degraded animal and 

 human figures 3 ." 



This may perhaps be the reason why so many of the drawings 

 of the metal period appear so inferior to those of the cave-dwellers 

 and of the present Bushmen 4 . They are often mere convention- 

 alised reductions of pictorial prototypes, comparable, for instance, 

 to the characters of our alphabets, which are known to be degraded 

 forms of earlier pictographs. 



1 Rin Schddel aus der cilteren ffallstattzt-if, in Verhandl. Berlin. Ges. f. 

 Anthrop. 1896, pp. 243 6. 



2 Dr Hans Seger, Figiirliche Darstelhingen auf schlesischen Grcibgefiisseii 

 dcr Hallstattzcit, Globus, Nov. 20, 1897. 



3 Ibid., p. 297. 4 Eth., pp. 88 and 249-50. 



