PRIMITIVE ART 321 



Patagonia I found in some fragments of ancient 

 primitive pottery of baked clay an ornamentation 

 made by pressing the finger-tips with the curved 

 nails on the moist clay; then I found other fragments 

 partly decorated symmetrically with small rhomboidal 

 marks, and this decoration had been made by pressing 

 the segmented shell of the armadillo on the clay before 

 baking. This, I should say, was the first conscious 

 step taken in the direction of plastic art after the 

 involuntary print of a foot on the wet sand had 

 stirred the sense of beauty and the creative instinct. 



This extremely primitive artistic effort of the 

 ancient Patagonians represents a stage of culture 

 very far below that of the cavemen in Europe with 

 their graphic pictures of wild animals incised on 

 rock and bone. But we can see all the early stages 

 in our own young barbarians playing in a mud- 

 puddle, progressing from printing a foot with all 

 its little toes complete to the moulding of "mud- 

 pies," and so on till the period of drawing human 

 figures on a slate — an O with two eye-dots for its 

 head; a straight and broadened line for the body, 

 with two lines below for legs and two above for arms. 

 And that is how the human form is represented by 

 the Greenlanders and Samoyedes. The grey Samoyede 

 and the five-year-old civilised child are mentally on 

 a level in art, while both in a sense are contemporaries 

 of the Patagonian savage of a thousand years ago, 

 and they are very much older than the cavemen of 

 Europe who probably perished of cold during the 

 glacial epoch. 



