MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 343 



for beauty's sake, and mark the attainment of true artistic power. So 

 the marking of pottery and its influence upon the evolution of the art 

 sense is very apparent, and its origin and development are fraught 

 with great interest to the student who tries to follow it back to its 

 birth in the dim vista of the unrecorded past. As a very primitive 

 art, both industrial and artistic, pottery-making is of great interest 

 and throws much light upon human cultural development. 



These examples indicate also the dawn of drawing, and were the 

 forerunners of artistic sketching and painting later on. Such 

 sketches were found in many of the caves of Europe, in drawings and 

 engravings of men and animals upon stones, bone, horn, slate, etc, 

 which are readily recognizable and exhibit no little natural artistic 

 instinct. Wall and rock carvings represent a very early stage of art, 

 but these were intended as signs or symbols, or contained a story 

 without much reference to art. The symbolic idea came first, and 

 the artistic conception of beauty was born much later. The artistic 

 idea is the one that persists, while the symbol is first lost, and the art 

 conception as a thing of beauty passes on and becomes part of the 

 life of the race as an inheritance. 



To the desire for ornamentation because of innate vanity must be 

 attributed the first attempts at coloring. Perhaps the earliest of 

 these attempts at painting was that of ornamenting the body with 

 colors, made from natural coloring materials found everywhere. 

 Some ancient carvings indicate that tattooing was early practiced, and 

 Naidailac says that "it is probable that our savage ancestors were 

 tattooed or colored their bodies. Indeed, a picture of the head and 

 arm of a man carved upon a bone have been found in a cave with a 

 tattoo mark upon the arm, and amongst the earliest remains are found 

 coloring materials and paint pots." The Seris, who are so low in all 

 culture, industrial and artistic, present a striking illustration of the 

 low birth of the desire for ornamenting the body. "The Seris are 

 characterized," Professor Magee says, "by extreme aesthetic poverty. 

 The people are pathetically poor in an industrial sense. Their equip- 

 ment in implements, wagons, utensils, etc., is meager, perhaps beyond 

 any parallel in America ; yet their aesthetic equipment, practically 

 limited as it is to a single line of symbolic portrayal, is still more de- 

 graded and meager. The only artistic attempt among the Seris is 

 that of face-painting of the female, which is quite elaborate. This 

 decoration is symbolic and has reference to the clan totems. It is 

 confined to the females, as descent is reckoned only through the fe- 

 male line. This is the one sole attempt at art found among this de- 

 graded people. From such low beginnings modern art was developed 

 by segregation and elaboration, and led by gradual steps from sym- 



