THE ORIGIN OF THE SWASTIKA 201 



Western Europe (see Chaps. I., II. and III.) — the artists 

 were busy with attempts (often wonderfully successful 

 ones) to present the outlines of familiar animals (and 

 sometimes plants) by incised carving on bone or painting 

 on the rock walls of caves — preceded, it is true, by a 

 period in which " all-round " sculpture in bone or stone 

 or modelling in clay was the method employed. The 

 extensive use of lines — concentric or parallel, like those 

 on the finger-tips — as decoration of stone work is not 

 known until the later or Neolithic period. 1 On one at 

 least of the incised bone drawings of the Palaeolithic 

 cave-men two little diamond-shaped lozenges are en- 

 graved. They are seen in the cave-men's drawing of 

 a stag figured on pp. 12, 13 of this book. These lozenges 

 are supposed to be the "signature" of the artist, and, 

 if so, are not only the first examples of a geometrical 

 rectilinear figure as ornament, but the earliest examples 

 known of the use of a badge or symbol as a means of 

 identification. 



When we compare the simpler decorative designs 

 made use of by the less cultivated races of men, we find 

 that there are certain distinct and opposed tendencies 

 the predominance of which is of importance in helping 

 us to explain the origin of the design. The tendency to 

 make straight lines and rectilinear angles, which we may 

 call the "rectilinear habit," is found in work executed 

 on hard stone by a graving tool, and in work where 

 square-cut stones are set together or flat pieces of wood 

 or straw are interlaced, and in coarser kinds of weaving, 

 beadwork, and basketwork. The opposite tendency is 

 found in work executed with a brush and fluid paint on 

 pottery or cloth, or even with a graver on soft clay or bone. 



1 But spiral and leaf-like decorative designs engraved on bone (see Fig. 

 29, p. 54) are found in caves associated with other carvings made by cave- 

 men of the Reindeer or late Palaeolithic period. 



