70 DANIEL WILSON ON THE ARTISTIC 



mauy American ludiau holoplirasms, appears to be one natural result of this widely preva- 

 lent imitative faculty. At the same time, it has ever to be kept in view that, whether we 

 study the physical form or the intellectual characteristics of native American races, it be- 

 comes more and more apparent that the New "World has been peopled from different 

 centres, and still presents essentially distinct types of race. It had its ferocious Caribs, 

 its Mexicans with their revolting human sacrifices and other bloody rites, and its stealthy 

 treacherous nomads, less courageous but not less cruel. But it has also gentler races, in 

 whom, as in the PeruAaans, the Zunis, and others of the Pueblo Indians, the œsthetic 

 faculty predominates, and overlays with mauy a graceful concomitant the utilitarian pro- 

 ducts of their industrial arts. 



Whether barbarous or civilized nations are grouped and classified in accordance with 

 their linguistic affinities, both are found to manifest other specialties which accord with 

 the diverse families of speech. The essential differences which separate the Aryan from 

 the Semitic races are not more marked than the intellectual and moral divergencies among 

 barbarous tribes. But while this is apparent on the Americail continent, its diverse 

 races are undoubtedly characterized by a more general aptitude for artistic imitation than 

 is observable elsewhere, except among the long-civilized nations of the Old "World, whose 

 composite languages reveal the sources of many borrowed arts. The Peruvian potter 

 sketched and modelled endless quaint devices in clay ; the Zuniau decorated his gracefully 

 fashioned ware with highly effective parti-coloured designs ; and the old Mound-builder 

 wrought in intaglio on his domestic and sepulchral vessels conventional flower patterns, 

 and in his miniature sculptures reproduced the fauna of an ai-ea extending from the Ohio 

 to the Grulf of Mexico. Native artificers of widely different American races manifest this 

 imitative faculty. Not only is the Indian pipe-sculptor found copying animate and inani- 

 mate objects with an observant eye and a ready hand ; but even the linear patterns on pot- 

 tery and straw basket-work are frequently made to assume combinations obviously sug- 

 gested by flowers and other familiar objects of nature. The perception of such 

 analogies, and even the capacity for appreciating the linear or pictorial representation of 

 objects on a flat surface, varies greatly in different races. Travellers have repeatedly de- 

 scribed the manifestation by savage races of an utter incapacity to comprehend pictured 

 representations. Mr. Oldfield, for example, tells how a large coloured engraving of a native 

 of New Holland was shewn to some Australians. "One declared it to be a ship, another a 

 kangaroo, and so on, not one of a dozen identifying the portrait as having any connection 

 with himself.'" The artistic faculty is unquestionably hereditary. There are artistic 

 families and artistic races. But if so, the pictorial skill of the palœolithic cave-dwellers 

 of "Western Europe was not transmitted to their successors. Guided not only by a com- 

 parison of their tools and weapons with those of the Neolithic Period, but also by cranial 

 and other physical evidence, we are led to assume the absence of any affinity between the 

 men of the Perigord caves and the rude bvxt greatly more modern races of Europe's later 

 Stone Period ; and their lack of the artistic feeling and imitative facility, so characteristic 

 of the elder race, adds confirmation to this opinion. 



Artistic sympathies, and a capacity for high achievements in painting and sculpture, 

 are neither the direct results of civilization, nor in many cases the product of culture and 



' Trans. Etlinol. Soc. N. S. iii. 227. 



