June, 1890 . 
THE ORIGIN OF DECORATIVE ART. 
138 
THE ORIGIN OF DECORATIVE ART AS ILLUS¬ 
TRATED BY THE ART OF MODERN SAVAGES.* 
BY HENRY BALFOUR, M.A., F.Z.S. 
(Continued from page 110.) 
Tlie art of decoration was without doubt in the first 
instance suggested to the mind of man in simple ways of 
this kind, and its origin should be referred back to the time 
when first man’s aesthetic appreciation of peculiarities, either 
natural or produced as accidents in manufacture, was suffici¬ 
ently developed to suggest the application of artificial means 
in order to increase their effect; in ocher words, to control 
them to serve the special purpose of ornament. 
The first stage in the development of decorative art is 
purely what may be termed an “ adaptive ” stage, that is, 
man simply accepts and adapts an effect which is accidentally 
suggested to him. But in the second stage, when an endea¬ 
vour is made to produce artificially a similar effect, in 
imitation of the natural one, a “ creative ” operation of the 
intellect is required. We have here the rudiments of copying, 
which is the means whereby all conventional or fanciful 
ornament of savage peoples has doubtless been produced. 
With a highly skilled artist it is no difficult matter to 
make a copy of some simple object or pattern, which shall 
so resemble the original as to be hardly distinguishable from 
it. With uncultured savages (and so we must believe also 
with primaeval man) it is different. In unskilled hands, and 
with indifferent tools, accurate copying is an impossibility ; 
and each new attempt at representing an object creates 
variations from the original type. Suppose, for example, 
that someone, whom I will call A, copies an object; and B 
copies from A’s version of it, without having seen the 
original ; and C from B, and so on ; in each case the new 
copy varies from the preceding one more or less according to 
the skill of the artist. We can see that in the course of time 
patterns can thus arise, which may by such successive 
copyings entirely lose all resemblance to the original object, 
and A’s would be a realistic version of it. I have in my 
possession an example, not from savage life, which illustrates 
this point. An original drawing of my own, representing a 
snail crawling over a twig, was given out to different people 
to be copied, as I have described. In each case I only gave 
the last copy of the series as it grew to the person who was 
to do the next sketch. In a series of 12—15 copies thus 
