ON THE HYPOTHESIS OF EVOLUTION. 153 



trial condition of our race preserved to the present day. Many 

 of them had no knowledge of the use of metals until they ob- 

 tained it from civilized men who visited them, while their pur- 

 suits were and are those of the chase, tending domestic animals, 

 and rudimental agriculture. 



y. Development of the Fine Arts. 



If we look at representation by drawing or sculpture, we find 

 that the efforts of the earliest races of which we have any knowl- 

 edge were quite similar to those which the untaught hand of in- 

 fancy traces o\\ its slate or the savage depicts on the rocky faces 

 of hills. The circle or triangle for the head and body, and 

 straight lines for the limbs, have been preserved as the first at- 

 tempts of the men of the stone period, as they are to this day the 

 sole representations of the human form which the North American 

 Indian places on his buffalo robe or mountain precipice. The 

 stiff, barely outlined form of the deer, the turtle, etc., are liter- 

 ally those of the infancy of civilized man. 



The first attempts at sculpture were marred by the influence 

 of modism. Thus the idols of Coban and Palenque, with human 

 faces of some merit, are overloaded with absurd ornament, and 

 deformed into frightful asymmetry, in compliance with the de- 

 mand of some imperious mode. In later days we have the stiff, 

 conventionalized figures of the palaces of Nineveh and the temples 

 of Eg}^t, where the representation of form has somewhat improved, 

 but is too often distorted by false fashion or imitation of some 

 unnatural standard, real or artistic. This is distinguished as the 

 day of archaic sculpture, which disappeared with the Etruscan 

 nation. So the drawings of the child, when he abandons the 

 simple lines, are stiff and awkward, and but a stage nearer true 

 representation ; and how often does he repeat some peculiarity or 

 absurdity of his own ! 



The introduction of the action and pose of life into sculpture 

 was not known before the early days of Greece, and it was there 

 that the art was brought to perfection. When art rose from its 

 mediaeval slumber, much the same succession of development may 

 be discovered. First, the stiff figures, with straightened limbs 

 and cylindric drapery, found in the old Northern churches — then 

 the forms of life that now adorn the porticoes and palaces of the 

 cities of Germanv. 



