348 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



who carved the knife -handles and etched the pictures of reindeer or 

 mammoths, in southwestern France, still lived in caves and holes of the 

 rock. But as soon as man began to dwell in a hut, that hut began to 

 take the impress of his growing testhetic tastes. Swiss lake-dwellings 

 present regular square or circular ground-plans. Esquimau snow- 

 houses are finished with as much regularity and neatness as if they 

 were built in the most durable material. Almost all savage huts are 

 picturesque in shape, and some are even artistic in their simple style 

 of architecture. The rudest tribes care for little but the exterior of 

 their dwellings, since the interior is only used as a shelter for sleeping 

 or a retreat from wet weather, not as a place of reception. Pride in 

 personal possessions, we must always remember, has uniformly formed 

 the stepping-stone on which our nature has slowly risen to a higher 

 aesthetic level. So, we find houses beginning to be ornamented inter- 

 nally just in proportion as they are used for purposes of display. 

 Even our own homes usually have the drawing- and dining-rooms much 

 more elaborately decorated and furnished than the other parts of the 

 house. The state-apartments of halls and palaces contain all the best 

 pictures and the handsomest mosaic tables that their owners possess. 



At this stage, the governmental and ecclesiastical impetus begins 

 to be strongly felt. From the very beginning, indeed, aesthetic prod- 

 ucts are specially the attributes of royalty and divinity. The clubs 

 and paddles noted above are those of chiefs alone : the Hawaiian 

 feather mantles were tahoo to the royal family : the ivory scepter and 

 the vermilion-painted face " belonged alike to the Roman god and to 

 the Roman king." But, when we reach a state of culture at which 

 the royal palace and the temple are widely different from the huts of 

 the subject, we find a great aesthetic advance. Architecture is indeed 

 a specially regal and religious art. All early buildings of any preten- 

 sions are either palaces or shrines : only at a comparatively late stage 

 of evolution, and under an industrial regime, do handsome mansions of 

 commoners begin to exist. Even in our own day, if we see an excep- 

 tionally large and pretentious house, we take it for granted that it 

 is, if not a palace, at least a public building. In India, all the great 

 architectural works are either mosques and temples or palaces and 

 mausoleums of native or foreign rulers. In Egypt, they are either 

 pyramids of dead kings or fanes of still earlier gods. So, too, in Mexico, 

 Peru, Central America. The catalogue of the works of art in Solo- 

 mon's temple and Solomon's house, whether authentic or not (and 

 good authorities accept it as historical), represents at any rate the 

 aesthetic status of the Hebrews at the date at which it was committed 



to wntmg. 



The king, then, from the first surrounds himself with such natural 

 or artistic products as add to his impressiveness and dignity. Troj^hies 

 and other decorations of M'arlike origin, badges and costumes, paint 

 and ointment, have been so fully treated in this connection by Mr. 



