512 DEVELOPMENT < >F PRIMAL SHAPING ARTS. 



more of these elements. If it did not contain varieties of stone suit- 

 able to each process, then there would be a disagreement between the 

 ideal order as here worked out and the real order. 



But the race may have been scattered over a wide region at the 

 period of the birth of art. separate groups having distinct ranges of 

 mineral resources. Great diversity of art conditions would thus 

 result. The group deprived of brittle stone would develop its lithic 

 art — no doubt very slowly — through the bruising, grinding, and cutting 

 process, and flaked objects would be practically unknown. The group 

 having only brittle stone would have but meager traces of pecking 

 and cutting operations, and flaked art would have full sway. To 

 cover the ground fully, a separate culture chart would have to he con- 

 structed for each group of isolated peoples, for the naked-stone age of 

 one would occupy the position on the chronologic scale required for 

 the pecked-stone period of the other. But the lines between mineral 

 regions tire not usually hard lines, and communities of men. howso- 

 ever primitive, are not fixed in habitat. Arts change with change of 

 place and consequent change of environment; and, taking the sum 

 total of the conditions under which a large number of groups of men 

 would live, the mean result must, it seems to me, correspond some- 

 what closely to that expressed in the diagram, which makes the four 

 primal shaping activities synchronous in origin but indicates different 

 rates of development. 



Although expressing the view that the exclusive use of a single 

 shaping process or a group of such processes for a long period seems 

 improbable, 1 do not wish to antagonize the idea of a flaked-stone 

 period in western Europe. My diagram allows for such a period, cov- 

 ering the space from A to B. That such a period should exist, even in 

 approximate purity, however, until the highest flaked forms were 

 developed, as to C, and until a graphic art equal to the realistic deline- 

 ation of men and animals on bone and ivory, say to I) in the incising 

 column, should exist and flourish, is, in view of the considerations 

 brought forward in this paper, not within the range of probability. 



CONCLUSION. 



This brief study can not assume to be more than an outline of the 

 general subject. Prolonged investigation is essential to the comple- 

 tion of such a work. 1 have sought means of approaching and exam- 

 ining that part of primeval history not within the ordinary scope of 

 research. Through an analysis of the elementary shaping processes — 

 the agencies by means of which man gained his sway over nature — I 

 have undertaken to determine the order in which these operations 

 woidd probably originate and develop, and thus to place the varied 

 art products to which they give rise in their proper relations with one 

 another and with the successive staares of unwritten history. 



