6 Mr. R. A. Daivson on 



one at Le Tene, at the head of Lake Neuchehatel, in Switzerland. 

 The Goidels arrived in Ireland in the bronze age stage of civilisa- 

 tion, which followed the advance of other contemporary races, 

 and had become proficient in the use of bronze. The Celts 

 borrowed freely from other nations their units of decoration, but • 

 they had the faculty of so modifying whatever they borrowed as 

 ultimately to give it a character of their own. Summing up the 

 decorative features of pagan Celtic art in the bronze age, which 

 were transmitted to the pagan and Christian art of the early iron 

 age, they had the closely coiled spiral or voluted spiral, the use of 

 rows of dots, the use of diagonal lines in preference to horizontal 

 and vertical ones, and the use of designs founded on the curved 

 Swastika. Of all these the spiral was the most important. The 

 two outstanding features of the art of the late Celtic period were, 

 to his mind, the long flowing curves and the further development 

 of spiral ornament into definite ornaments based on the Swastika 

 and Triskele spirals. The Swastika and Triskele developments, 

 although found in Scotland and England, were more characteristi- 

 cally Irish. It was the Irish artists who took these forms and 

 worked them up to the highest degree of perfection, and they re- 

 mained the masters of this class of ornament up to the eleventh 

 or twelfth century in the Christian period. The metal workers of 

 the late Celtic period were not only capable of executing some of 

 the finest pieces of repousse bronze that the world has ever seen, 

 but they also excelled in producing works of art in wrought irori 

 of great merit. Specimens of decoration on wood had been found, 

 and it might interest some of them to know that poker-work was 

 used as a means of decoration. To sum up, the characteristics of 

 the late Celtic or early iron age designs were — (i) the flamboyant 

 curves, probably suggested by foreign foliated ornament, but 

 reduced more or less to geometrical lines ; (2) spiral forms based 

 on the Triskele and Swastika ; (3) curved geometrical forms ; (4) 

 straight-lined geometrical forms; (5) enamels were used; and 

 (6) the different kinds of shading engraved on metal, wood, bone, 

 and pottery. The leading characteristics of the Celtic Christian 



