556 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
chevron pattern, formed of three pairs of diagonal lines, had been 
incised (fig. 5). Mr J. Y. Buchanan has told me that the chevron 
zigzag is known to the natives of New Guinea as the snake 
pattern, obviously from its undulations. 
Diagonal lines, running in opposite directions and meeting at 
their ends so as to form a zigzag arrangement, is evidently a 
favourite design with the natives of New Guinea. In Messrs 
Dorsey and Holmes’s memoir on sculptured skulls, six examples are 
reproduced, twice in association with other patterns and four 
times in its simple form, though in each instance the diagonal lines 
were included between horizontal lines, as in the majority of my 
specimens. One can scarcely conceive a more elementary mode of 
ornamentation or one more likely to mark an early stage in the 
evolution of decorative art, and it is by no means confined to 
existing barbarous races. When we examine the unglazed urns 
not unfrequently found in the short stone cists, which in Scotland 
are so characteristic a mode of interment of the people of the 
Bronze Age, we find that the ornamentation is of this character ; 
and in a specimen now before me the exterior of the urn is covered 
with horizontal and diagonal lines from the lip to the base. 
The natives of New Guinea by no means limit themselves in the 
use of the chevron ornament to the decoration of skulls. In 
Professor Haddon’s valuable memoir on the Decorative Art of 
British New Guinea , many examples of the employment of this 
pattern, under various modifications, are figured as applied to the 
