^ESTHETIC FEELING IN BIRDS. 657 



developed taste. The huts of savages are generally square, circular, 

 or oval in shape, neatly wattled at symmetrical distances. The earliest 

 architecture consists of regular stone rings, avenues, tumuli, and other 

 definitely shaped monuments. Dr. Schweinfurth's "Heart of Africa" 

 contains pictures of pottery as beautiful as anything ever produced in 

 Greece or Etruria, stools, chairs, and other furniture as gracefully 

 shaped as anything ever wrought by a Renaissance carver, and villages 

 as prettily arranged after their simple fashion as the architects of the 

 Parthenon or Cologne could have arranged them. If we look back in 

 time, we find the stone hatchets and arrow-heads, not only of the neo- 

 lithic but even of the palaeolithic age, carefully symmetrical in shape, 

 and that at a time when the extra labor of chipping the flints into 

 comeliness must have entailed a considerable waste of human or half- 

 human energy. At the same early date we find fossil shells, symmetri- 

 cal bones, teeth, and other like objects, already drilled to serve as neck- 

 laces or other ornaments, which analogy with the similar ornaments 

 now in use would lead us to believe were symmetrically strung to- 

 gether into definite patterns. Indeed, the more we look at the prod- 

 ucts of the very lowest savages and the very earliest men, the more 

 shall we be convinced that they possessed in the germ all those aesthetic 

 feelings which have finally developed our existing architecture and 

 other decorative or semi-decorative arts. 



Again, we can not fail to be struck by the fact that man has always 

 employed for ornamental purposes exactly those very appendages of 

 animals which, if the theory of sexual selection be correct, have been 

 produced by the animals themselves as ornamental adjuncts. The 

 feathers of peacocks, the plumes of the ostrich and the bird-of -para- 

 dise, the antlers of deers, the horns of antelopes, the tusks of elephants, 

 mammoths, and musk-deer, the striped, spotted, or dappled skins of 

 mammals, all these have been used from the earliest periods as mate- 

 rials for decoration by mankind. Exactly the same curls, twists, and 

 patterns which seem to please the eyes of animals are known to please 

 the eyes of man, even in his lowest developments. If these ornaments 

 were not produced because the creatures themselves found them beau- 

 tiful, at least they are the same as those which would have been pro- 

 duced had the taste of such creatures coincided in the main with that 

 which runs throughout the whole of humanity, from the most degraded 

 savage to the highest artist. 



Moreover, part at least of the pleasure of form probably has a 

 purely sensuous origin. The superiority of curved lines to straight, 

 of the waving or sinuous contour to the angular, is apparently con- 

 nected with the muscular process in the act of vision. Hence there is 

 no reason why it might not be felt by intelligent animals, just as we 

 know that it is felt, and acutely felt, by hardly more intelligent men. 



Similar conclusions are forced upon us if we look at the nature of 

 the supposed ornaments themselves. They are almost always, like the 

 vol. xvii. 42 



