CERAMIC DECORATION—ITS EVOLUTION AND ITS 
APPLICATIONS. 
By Louis FRANCHET. 
Some author has said “ The ceramic art is one of the most ancient 
of the world’s arts. Its birth is lost in the shadows of time.” It 
is into these deep shadows that we must first penetrate, but there is 
little fear that we shall lose our way, for glowing trails have been 
blazed for us by such men as Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, de Mor- 
tillet, Piette and others still, who have made prehistoric civilization 
known to us. 
Among all the industrial arts, ceramics is of the most controlling 
interest when we wish to study the evolution of that artistic sense 
that has developed little by little among men. 
To express the conception of his genius the potter must be at once 
a modeller, a sculptor, and a painter. He must also possess special 
faculties of invention and intuition so as to avoid the pitfalls scat- 
tered along his path, hazards which he meets at every turn in the 
preparation of his clays, in the working of them and above all in 
their baking. 
The study of ceramic decoration is also of considerable importance 
in connection with the history of peoples, since it often affords a 
means of following the progression of great migrations and even dis- 
closes, as we shall see later, the very customs of the ancients. It is 
the ceramic art, even more than metallurgy, which enables us to 
more fully appreciate the degree of civilization of races which have 
gone before us. 
We must look back, to be sure, several hundred centuries to find 
the first appearance of ceramic objects and we are struck with ad- 
miration as we examine the remarkable conceptions that emanated 
from the still primitive brain of man. 
There are not yet in our possession any positive proofs that pot- 
tery was known in the paleolithic epoch, in the hewn stone age, but 
@Translated by permission from Revue Scientifique, Paris, 47th year, No. 
23, June 5, 1909. 
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