266 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



to ruin if the props of our conventional theology are not maintained. 

 When I see an able, and in many respects courageous man, running to 

 and fro upon the earth, and wringing his hands over the threatened 

 loss of his ideals, I feel disposed to exhort him to cast out this skep- 

 ticism, and to believe undoubtingly that in the mind of man we have 

 the substratum of all ideals. We have there capacity which will as 

 surely and infallibly respond to the utterances of a really living soul 

 as string responds to string when the proper note is sounded. It is 

 the function of the teacher of humanity to call forth this resonance of 

 the human heart, and the possibility of doing so depends wholly and 

 solely upon the fact that the conditions for its production are already 

 there. 



-*- 



EVOLUTION IN OBNAMENT. 



By CH. FEED. HAETT. 



ON the two Morgan Expeditions to the Amazonas, in 1870 and 

 1871, there was obtained from a burial-mound on the island of 

 Maraj6, or Johannes, a lot of ancient pottery, consisting of burial- 

 urns, idols, utensils of various kinds, personal ornaments, etc., many 

 of which were richly ornamented with grecques, and scrolled borders 

 of a very high order of development. The resemblance borne by some 

 of these ornaments to Old-World classic forms was very striking, and 

 certain borders were, even in their accessories, identical with similar 

 ornaments in Etruscan art. It has already been pointed out by Owen 

 Jones that the so-called Greek fret has a very wide distribution, oc- 

 curring not only in Egyptian and Greek art, but in that of India and 

 China, while, in the New World, it was cultivated widely in both 

 Americas. The distribution of these simple ornamental forms among 

 widely-separated savage tribes renders it extremely unlikely that they 

 should have all been derived from a common source, and their inde- 

 pendent origin is all the more probable, since it has been conclusively 

 shown that identical myths, religious ideas, manners and customs, 

 found in different parts of the earth, have often originated indepen- 

 dently of one another. Yet, while it is quite easy to understand how 

 pottery might be invented by two different tribes, how is it possi- 

 ble that the same series of ornamental forms should arise among sev- 

 eral independent and disconnected peoples? To the solution of this 

 question I have addressed myself, and in this paper I propose to give, 

 in a very condensed form, some of the more important results of my 

 studies. 1 



1 In my volume on the "Antiquities of Brazil," now nearly ready for the press, I shall, 

 in connection with an analysis of the ornaments of the Marajo pottery, treat of this sub- 

 ject much more thoroughly. 



