From Egypt to Ireland. 21 



Young children did not begin by drawing patterns or designing 

 geometrical combinations, but what might be called very 

 realistic representations of their near relatives — and it was at a 

 later stage that they proceeded to take an interest in design and 

 ornament, in combinations and beauty lines. And so it was 

 that the earliest records that primitive man had left behind him 

 were realistic representations of animals which he had hunted 

 and of people round about him. Additional proof of this fact 

 was supplied by the illustrations on the carved bones found in 

 the caves of France left therein by the cave men. These 

 represented the most primitive examples of art they had, and 

 they showed a great power of grasping the actualities of 

 the animals which they represented. Passing from realistic 

 representations, they came to the stage when man manifested 

 a desire to enrich the objects which he found around him in his 

 daily life, and to apply his power of drawing to the beautifying 

 of the object. The moment he reached that stage he was 

 constrained and limited by the shape of the object which 

 he was representing, and this constraining influence led him 

 to combination lines. The forms which he at first drew 

 realistically assumed a definite design. The design was evolved 

 until ultimately patterns were evolved, and at the last stage 

 they reached geometrical foims. They would see that if they 

 went on simplifying any design they would ultimately come 

 upon the right lines. Primitive man was now coming to the 

 stage in which he took pleasure in the beauty of lines, and not 

 merely in the graphic representations of things. He wanted to 

 put before them a definite historical fact, and to interest them 

 in what he might call the wandering of the spirals, and to show 

 them how certain patterns had travelled across the world, and 

 how even in Ireland, in the remote west, they found trimmings 

 of some of those early patterns beginning in far away 

 Egypt. Continuing, Mr. Coffey described the historical 

 sequence of some of the most characteristic Egyptian patterns 

 of the different dynasties. The series of slides illustrating these 

 patterns was especially interesting, many of the patterns being 



