324 THE FIRST POTTER 



patterns, produced by pressing the tip of the finger and the- 

 nail into the plastic material. It is wonderful what capital 

 and varied results you can get with no more recondite 

 graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes turned front 

 downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes 

 used to egg up the moist clay into small jagged and re- 

 lieved designs. Most of these patterns are more or less 

 plaitlike in arrangement, evidently suggested to the mind 

 of the potter by the primitive marks of the old basketwork. 

 But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into 

 his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, 

 and the flint knife itself, with which he incised more 

 regular patterns, straight or zigzag lines, rows of dots, 

 squares and triangles, concentric circles, and even the 

 mystic cross and swastika, the sacred symbols of yet unborn 

 and undreamt-of religions. As yet, there was no direct 

 imitation of plant or animal forms ; once only, on a single 

 specimen from a Swiss lake dwelling, are the stem and 

 veins of a leaf dimly figured on the handiwork of the Euro- 

 pean prehistoric potter. Ornament in its pure form, as pat- 

 tern merely, had begun to exist ; imitative work as such was 

 yet unknown, or almost unknown, to the eastern hemisphere. 

 In America, it was quite otherwise. The forgotten 

 people who built the mounds of Ohio and the great tumuli 

 of the Mississippi valley decorated their pottery not only 

 with animal figures, such as snakes, fish, frogs, and 

 turtles, but also with human heads and faces, many of 

 them evidently modelled from the life, and some of them 

 quite unmistakably genuine portraits. On one such vase, 

 found in Arkansas, and figured by the Marquis de Na- 

 daillac in his excellent work on Prehistoric America, the 

 ornamentation consists (in true Bed Indian taste) of 

 skeleton hands, interspersed with crossbones ; and the 

 delicacy and anatomical correctness of the detail inevitably 



