210 
ated long before any Europeans touched these shores, for we can> 
discern it on the stone mortars and whale-bone^ clubs that have been 
recovered from prehistoric shell-heaps. The modern artists of the 
Pacific coast have but carried on the ancient tradition and applied 
it a little more widely. They look upon their figures with the eyes of 
an anatomist, dissect them as it were, and rearrange the parts to suit 
the shape of the object that they are decorating. In tlie simplest 
representations they appear to be w'orking with the skins of birds and 
animals. Thus a frog carved on the walls of a circular dish will reveal 
one lateral profile on one side and one on the other, as though the 
sculptor had draped the skin over and around the vessel, cut out the 
centre and treated the dish as the batrachiaifs body. Similarly, a. 
human figure carved on the rounded front of a house-]>ost or totem- 
pole creates the illusion that the artist has divided his model down 
the back, spread it, and attached it to the pole in two halves. The 
same jn'oeess of “ dissection ” or halving is applied to })lane surfaces 
also, as in the paintings on the flat boards of houses and the paintings- 
and carvings on wooden boxes. Evidently the artistic tradition 
requires that certain significant parts of each figure shall be repre- 
sented whether they would normally be visible or not. It is exactly 
the same reasoning as that of the European child who endows a. 
human profile with two eyes or two ears, although only one of each 
should be shown in this perspective. 
The Indian artist, however, goes much farther than the child. 
Limitations of space in the field that he is decorating, and a strong 
desire for symmetry and balance, will make him distort the different 
elements in a figure, disjoint, and rearrange them without regard to 
their proper anatomical positions. lie may jfface the tail of an 
animal above its head, the wings of a bird beside its legs. Then he 
conventionalizes many elements — represents joints, for example, by 
circles, eyes by circles, rounded rectangles and other more compli- 
cated designs; and he utilizes these conventionalized, half-geometric 
patterns as purely decorative features wherever he wishes to avoid 
blank spaces. Furthermore, his psychological attitude towarrls the 
animal world, his belief that animals are fundamentally like men, 
though clothed in different forms, leads him frequently to depict 
them as human beings, but with the addition of fixed symbols to 
1 I.e., bone of whhle. not baleen. 
