PREHISTORIC ART. 419 



work was Lis love of beauty and his desire to ^fratify it. This love 

 was purely iesthetie and without any utility so far as relates to the 

 engravings ou bone, etc., and only partly utilitarian when emi)loyed in 

 the beautifying of weapons and implements. 



This innate love of ornament has been pushed by some primitive 

 peoples to such extremes as to interfere with the utility of the 

 decorated object, as in the carving of the handles of Mangaian symbolic 

 adzes of the Hervey Islanders; but this belongs to more modern times. 

 We are now dealing with the earlier, the Paleolithic man, with man 

 in the infancy of his race, and we lind his ornaments to have been 

 more simple; they had not then run to excess nor interfered with the 

 utdity of the decorated object. 



These engravings and decorations during the Paleolithic period 

 stand as the foundation or beginning of all art, and we will see how, 

 through the civilization to come after tliem in the Neolithic and Bronze 

 Ages, these Paleolithic motifs were repeated again and again, how 

 they varied, how they grew, and yet how, down to the end of the pre- 

 historic and the beginning of the historic period, they never got beyond 

 lines or dots, which combined made the parallel lines, the chevron, the 

 herrmgbone, the zigzag, and simihir simple geometric designs. They 

 all grew out of the same beginning and had the same origin. They had 

 no occult meaning; they never stood for any great divinity or power, 

 whether natural or sui)ernatinal; they were simply lines and dots 

 arranged in ornamental form to gratify man's innate sense of beauty 

 and because he wished the things he possessed to be beauteous in his 

 eyes. 



It is needless to discuss the causes of this natural and innate taste 

 on the part of man. He is born with it, it is part of him, its manifes- 

 tations afford him pleasure, they gratify his senses, and are to be 

 classed in the same category as the delights of the palate, the beauties 

 of color, and the sweetness of music. He has these tastes, he enjoy^s 

 their gratitication, and he indulges them when he has the opportunity. 



Mr. W. J. Stillma:i, in "Old Kome and the New," says: 



The modern conception of the arts of design is that they .ire intended as the 

 mirror of nature; the ancient and true one is that they were the outcome of emotion, 

 aspiration, and imagination or spiritual conception of the artist. 



These observations may find other illustrations throughout this paper. 

 They might have been postj)oned to another portion, but they come 

 properly in this place, and the author has deemed wise to insert them 

 here at the conclusion of this chapter, that reference may be made to 

 them in the future reading. 



While there have been inventions and duplicate inventions of new 

 designs and reinvention of forgotten ones, yet it is the belief of the 

 author that as a rule the perpetuation of ornamental designs was by 

 inutation and teaching, passing from generation to generation, from 

 parent to child, and from master to servant or slave. Decorative art 



