cushing.) EVOLUTION OF DECORATION. 509 



it was necessary to mix the clay of vessels with a tempering of sand, 

 crushed potsherds, or the like, to prevent it from cracking while dry 

 ing ; this, of course, no amount of rubbing would remove. Hence, by 

 another easy step, clay unmixed with a grit-tempering, made into a thin 

 paste with water, and thickly applied to the half dried jar with a dab 

 or brush of soft fiber, gave a beautifully smooth surface, especially if 

 polished afterward by rubbing with water-worn pebbles. The vessel 

 thus prepared, when burned, assumed invariably a creamy, pure white, 

 red-brown or, other color, according to the quality or kind of the clay 

 used in making the paste with which it had been smoothed or washed. 



Thus was achieved the art of producing at will fictiles of different 

 colors, with which simple suggestion painting also became easy. Black, 

 aside from clay paste, was almost the first pigment discovered ; quite 

 likely because the mineral blacks from iron ores, coal, and the various 

 rocks used universally among Indians for staining splints, etc., would 

 be the earliest tried, and then adopted, as they remained unchanged by 

 firing. Thus it came about, as evidenced by the sequence of early 

 remains in the Southwest, that the white and black varieties of pottery 

 were the first made, then the red and black, and later the red with white 

 and black decoration. Take, as an example, the latter. Of course it 

 was a simple mode to employ the red (ocherous) clay for the wash, the 

 blue clay (which burned white) for the white pigment in making lines, 

 and any of the black minerals above mentioned for other marking. 



In these earliest kinds of painted pottery the angular decorations of 

 the corrugated ware or of basketry were repeated, or at the farthest only 

 elaborated, although on some specimens the suggestions of the curved 

 ornament already occurred. These resulted, I may not fear to claim, 

 from carelessness or awkwardness in drawing, for instance, the corners 

 of acute angles, which "cutting across-lot" would, it may be seen, pro- 

 duce the wavy or meandering line from the zigzag, the ellipsoid from 

 the rectangle, and so on. 



Precisely in accordance with this theory were the studies of my pre- 

 ceptor, the lamented Trof. Charles Fred. Hartt. In a paper "On 

 Evolution in Ornament," published in several periodicals, among them 

 the Popular Science Monthly of January, 1875, this gifted naturalist 

 illustrated his studies by actual examples found on decorated burial urns 

 from Marajo Island. I must take the liberty of suggesting, however, 

 that upon some antecedent kind of vessel, the eyes of the Amazonian 

 Islanders may have been, to give Professor Hartt's idea, "trained to 

 take physiological and aesthetic delight in regularly recurring lines and 

 dots"; not on the pottery itself, as he seemed to think, for decoratiou 

 was old in basketry and the textiles when pottery was first made. 



