518 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1930 



The use of animal forms so prevalent in the art of stools and 

 chairs is apparently normal in all art at a certain stage and grows 

 out of the importance of animals in cult. The stool in many cases 

 is nothing more than a practical appliance for raising the body 

 from the ground, but at times is found to take on a cult phase due 

 to social advances, that is, it becomes an adjunct of social superiority 

 and is designed accordingly to convey some symbolic evidences of 

 power. Chairs set apart the sitter and elevate him in more than 

 one sense. Hence seats are made in the form of totemic animals or 

 those supposed to possess attributes of cunning, strength, or ferocity. 



Whatever of suggestiveness aside from cult ideas was involved 

 in the animal-leg furniture of Egypt it is difficult to say. The artist 

 in designing furniture would be likely to know more ancient models 

 which he would use, or he might see that a 4-legged chair or couch 

 suggests a quadruped intended to bear the weight of the sitter and 

 thus be led to model the legs after some animal. Unquestionably 

 these changes in style are frequent and are characteristic of the 

 designer's art, but it is logical to trace them back to the animal cults 

 of the mythologic period so convincingly elaborated by Andrew Lang 

 in his Myth, Ritual, and Religion.^^ In many, perhaps a major- 

 ity of cases, the practical side of seating furniture is seen to develop 

 parallel with cult ideas introduced into seats. These are seen in the 

 illustrations of many seats carved out in curious forms and lavishly 

 decorated but evidently expressing no cult idea. 



s^Vol. 11, p. 339. London, 1901. 



