filly 10, 1884] 



NA TURE 



249 



One cannot go wrong in taking for granted that plant- 

 forms were the archetypes of all these patterns. Now we 

 know that it holds good, as a general principle in the his- 

 tory of civilisation, that the tiller of the ground supplants 

 the shepherd, as the shepherd supplants the hunter : and 

 the like holds also in the history of the branch of art we 

 are discussing, — representations of animals are the first to 

 make their appearance, and they are at this period re- 

 markable for a wonderful sharpness of characterisation. 

 At a later stage man first begins to exhibit a prefer- 

 ence for plant-forms as subjects for representation, and 

 above all for such as can in any way be useful or hurt- 

 ful to him. We, however, meet such plant-forms used in 



ornament in the oldest extant monuments of art in Egypt, 

 side by side with representations of animals ; but the 

 previous history of this very developed culture is un- 

 known. In such cases as afford us an opportunity of 

 studying more primitive though not equally ancient stages 

 of culture, as for instance among the Greeks, we find the 

 above dictum confirmed, at any rate in cases where we 

 have to deal with the representation of the indigenous 

 flora as contradistinguished from such representations of 

 plants as were imported from foreign civilisations. In the 

 case that is now to occupy us we have not to go back so 

 very far in the history of the world. 



The ornamental representations of plants are of two 



kinds. Where we have to deal with a simple pictorial 

 reproduction of plants as symbols (laurel branches, 

 boughs of olive and fir, and branches of ivy), i.e. with a 

 mere characteristic decoration of a technical structure, 

 stress is laid upon the most faithful reproduction of the 

 object possible, — the artist is again and again referred to 

 the study of Nature in order to imitate her. Hence, as a 

 general rule, there is less difficulty in the explanation of 

 these forms, because even the minute details of the natural 

 object now and then offer points that one can fasten upon. 

 It is quite another thing when we have to deal with actual 

 decoration which does not aim at anything further than 

 at employing the structural laws of organisms in order to 

 organise the unwieldy substance, to endow the stone with 



a higher vitality. These latter forms depart, even at the 

 time when they originate, very considerably from the 

 natural objects. The successors of the originators soon 

 still further modify them by adapting them to particular 

 purposes, combining and fusing them with other forms 

 so as to produce particular individual forms which 

 have each their own history {e.g. the Acanthus ornament, 

 which, in its developed form, differs very greatly from the 

 Acanthus plant itself); and in a wider sense we may 

 here enumerate all such forms as have been raised byart 

 to the dignity of perfectly viable beings, e.g. griffins, 

 sphinxes, dragons, and angels. 



The deciphering and derivation of such forms as these 

 is naturally enough more difficult ; in the case of most of 



them we are not even in possession of the most necessary 

 preliminaries to the investigation, and in the case of 

 others there are very important links missing {e.g. for the 

 well-known Greek palmettas). In proportion as the repre- 

 sentation of the plant was a secondary object, the travesty 

 has been more and more complete. As in the case of 

 language, where the root is hardly recognisable in the 

 later word, so in decorative art the original form is in- 

 distinguishable in the ornament. The migration of races 

 and the early commercial intercourse between distant 

 lands have done much to bring about the fusion of types ; 

 but again in contrast to this we find, in the case of exten- 

 sive tracts of country, notably in the Asiatic continent, a 

 fixity, throughout centuries, of forms that have once been 



introduced, which occasions a confusion between ancient 

 and modern works of art, and renders investigations 

 much more difficult. An old French traveller writes:— 

 "J'ai vu dans le tre'sor d'Ispahan les vetenients de 

 Tamerlan ; ils ne different en rien de ceux d'aujourd'hui." 

 Ethnologv, the natural sciences, and last, but not least, 

 the history of technical art are here set face to face with 

 great problems. 



In the case in point, the study of the first group of 

 artistic forms that have been elaborated by Western art 

 leads to definite results, because the execution of the 

 forms in stone can be followed on monuments that are 

 relatively not very old, that are dated, and of which the 

 remains are still extant. In order to follow the develop- 



