244 FIELD AND HEDGEROW. 
them like coronals for present ornament and future re- 
galement. These creatures are nevertheless artists. On 
the walls of caves they have painted the antelope and 
the lion in bright colours; they have not only caught 
the shape and hue of the animals about them, but their 
action and movement. The figures are in motion, | 
skilfully drawn and full of spirit. 
If any one asks, Is the application of Art to the chase 
rcally so old, so very very old, as this? I refer them to 
the stars. How long ago is it since the constellations 
received their names? At what date were they first 
arranged in groups? Upon the most ancient monuments 
and in the most ancient writings they have the same 
forms assigned to them as at this day, and that too in 
countries remote from each other. The signs of the 
Zodiac are almost as old as the stars themselves ; that 
is, as old as the time when the stars were first beheld of 
human. eyes. Amongst them there is the Archer— 
Sagittarius—the chase in the shape of man; greatest 
and grandest of all the constellations is Orion, the mighty 
hunter, the giant who slew the wild beasts by strength. 
There is no assemblage of stars so brilliant as those which 
compose the outline of Orion ; the Hunter takes the first 
place in the heavens. Art exists in the imagination— 
imagination drew lines from star to star, and repeated its 
life on earth in the sky. 
So it is true that the first picture-—whcther drawn by 
the imagination alone in the constellations, on the walls 
of the cave with ochre and similar materials, or engraved 
with keen splinters of flint on the mammoth’s tusk—the 
first picture was of the chase. Animals are earliest, the 
human form next, flowers and designs and storics in 
drawings next, and landscape last of all. Landscape is 
peculiarly the art of the moderns—it is the art of our 
