'Avoid Coleridge, he is _useless_,' says Mr. Ruskin. Why should the
poetry of Coleridge be useful? The question may interest the critic, but
we are only concerned with Mr. Ruskin here, for one reason. His
disparagement of Coleridge as 'useless' is a survival of the belief that
art should be 'useful.' This is the savage's view of art. He imitates
nature, in dance, song, or in plastic art, for a definite practical
purpose. His dances are magical dances, his images are made for a
magical purpose, his songs are incantations. Thus the theory that art is
a disinterested expression of the imitative faculty is scarcely warranted
by the little we know of art's beginnings. We shall adopt,
provisionally, the hypothesis that the earliest art with which we are
acquainted is that of savages contemporary or extinct. Some philosophers
may tell us that all known savages are only degraded descendants of early
civilised men who have, unluckily and inexplicably, left no relics of
their civilisation. But we shall argue on the opposite theory, that the
art of Australians, for example, is really earlier in kind, more
backward, nearer the rude beginnings of things, than the art of people
who have attained to some skill in pottery, like the New Caledonians.
These, again, are much more backward, in a state really much earlier,
than the old races of Mexico and Peru; while they, in turn, show but a
few traces of advance towards the art of Egypt; and the art of Egypt, at
least after the times of the Ancient Empire, is scarcely advancing in the
direction of the flawless art of Greece. We shall be able to show how
savage art, as of the Australians, develops into barbarous art, as of the
New Zealanders; while the arts of strange civilisations, like those of
Peru and Mexico, advance one step further; and how, again, in the early
art of Greece, in the Greek art of ages prior to Pericles, there are
remains of barbaric forms which are gradually softened into beauty. But
there are necessarily breaks and solutions of continuity in the path of
progress.
One of the oldest problems has already risen before us in connection with
the question stated--is art the gratification of the imitative faculty?
Now, among the lowest, the most untutored, the worst equipped savages of
contemporary races, art is rather decorative on the whole than imitative.
The patterns on Australian shields and clubs, the scars which they raise
on their own flesh by way of tattooing, are very rarely imitations of any
objects in nature. The Australians, like the Red Indians, like many
African and some aboriginal Indian races, Peruvians, and others,
distinguish their families by the names of various plants and animals,
from which each family boasts its descent. Thus you have a family called
Kangaroos, descended, as they fancy, from the kangaroo; another from the
cockatoo, another from the black snake, and so forth. Now, in many
quarters of the globe, this custom and this superstition, combined with
the imitative faculty in man, has produced a form of art representing the
objects from which the families claim descent. This art is a sort of
rude heraldry--probably the origin of heraldry. Thus, if a Red Indian
(say a Delaware) is of the family of the Turtle, he blazons a turtle on
his shield or coat, probably tattoos or paints his breast with a figure
of a turtle, and always has a turtle, _reversed_, designed on the pillar
above his grave when he dies, just as, in our mediaeval chronicles, the
leopards of an English king are reversed on his scutcheon opposite the
record of his death. But the Australians, to the best of my knowledge,
though they are much governed by belief in descent from animals, do not
usually blazon their crest on their flesh, nor on the trees near the
place where the dead are buried. They have not arrived at this pitch of
imitative art, though they have invented or inherited a kind of runes
which they notch on sticks, and in which they convey to each other secret
messages. The natives of the Upper Darling, however, do carve their
family crests on their shields. In place of using imitative art, the
Murri are said, I am not quite sure with what truth, to indicate the
distinction of families by arrangements of patterns, lines and dots,
tattooed on the breast and arms, and carved on the bark of trees near
places of burial. In any case, the absence of the rude imitative art of
heraldry among a race which possesses all the social conditions that
produce this art is a fact worth noticing, and itself proves that the
native art of one of the most backward races we know is not essentially
imitative.
[Fig. 1. An Australian Shield: 278.jpg]
Anyone who will look through a collection of Australian weapons and
utensils will be brought to this conclusion. The shields and the clubs
are elaborately worked, but almost always without any representation of
plants, animals, or the human figure. As a rule the decorations take the
simple shape of the 'herring-bone' pattern, or such other patterns as can
be produced without the aid of spirals, or curves, or circles. There is
a natural and necessary cause of this choice of decoration. The
Australians, working on hard wood, with tools made of flint, or broken
glass, or sharp shell, cannot easily produce any curved lines. Everyone
who, when a boy, carved his name on the bark of a tree, remembers the
difficulty he had with S and G, while he got on easily with letters like
M and A, which consist of straight or inclined lines. The savage artist
has the same difficulty with his rude tools in producing anything like
satisfactory curves or spirals. We engrave above (Fig. 1) a shield on
which an Australian has succeeded, with obvious difficulty, in producing
concentric ovals of irregular shape. It may be that the artist would
have produced perfect circles if he could. His failure is exactly like
that of a youthful carver of inscriptions coming to grief over his G's
and S's. Here, however (Fig. 2), we have three shields which, like the
ancient Celtic pipkin (the tallest of the three figures in Fig. 3), show
the earliest known form of savage decorative art--the forms which survive
under the names of 'chevron' and 'herring-bone.' These can be scratched
on clay with the nails, or a sharp stick, and this primeval way of
decorating pottery made without the wheel survives, with other relics of
savage art, in the western isles of Scotland. The Australian had not
even learned to make rude clay pipkins, but he decorated his shields as
the old Celts and modern old Scotch women decorated their clay pots, with
the herring-bone arrangement of incised lines. In the matter of colour
the Australians prefer white clay and red ochre, which they rub into the
chinks in the woodwork of their shields. When they are determined on an
ambush, they paint themselves all over with white, justly conceiving that
their sudden apparition in this guise will strike terror into the boldest
hearts. But arrangements in black and white of this sort scarcely
deserve the name of even rudimentary art.
[Fig. 2. Shields: 280.jpg]
[Fig. 3. Savage Ornamentation: 282.jpg]
The Australians sometimes introduce crude decorative attempts at
designing the human figure, as in the pointed shield opposite (Fig. 2,
a), which, with the other Australian designs, are from Mr. Brough Smyth's
'Aborigines of Victoria.' But these ambitious efforts usually end in
failure. Though the Australians chiefly confine themselves to decorative
art, there are numbers of wall-paintings, so to speak, in the caves of
the country which prove that they, like the Bushmen, could design the
human figure in action when they pleased. Their usual preference for the
employment of patterns appears to me to be the result of the nature of
their materials. In modern art our mechanical advantages and facilities
are so great that we are always carrying the method and manner of one art
over the frontier of another. Our poetry aims at producing the effects
of music; our prose at producing the effects of poetry. Our sculpture
tries to vie with painting in the representation of action, or with lace-
making in the production of reticulated surfaces, and so forth. But the
savage, in his art, has sense enough to confine himself to the sort of
work for which his materials are fitted. Set him in the bush with no
implements and materials but a bit of broken shell and a lump of hard
wood, and he confines himself to decorative scratches. Place the black
in the large cave which Pundjel, the Australian Zeus, inhabited when on
earth (as Zeus inhabited the cave in Crete), and give the black plenty of
red and white ochre and charcoal, and he will paint the human figure in
action on the rocky walls. Later, we will return to the cave-paintings
of the Australians and the Bushmen in South Africa. At present we must
trace purely decorative art a little further. But we must remember that
there was once a race apparently in much the same social condition as the
Australians, but far more advanced and ingenious in art. The earliest
men of the European Continent, about whom we know much, the men whose
bones and whose weapons are found beneath the gravel-drift, the men who
were contemporary with the rhinoceros, mammoth, and cave-bear, were not
further advanced in material civilisation than the Australians. They
used weapons of bone, of unpolished stone, and probably of hard wood. But
the remnants of their art, the scraps of mammoth or reindeer bone in our
museums, prove that they had a most spirited style of sketching from the
life. In a collection of drawings on bone (probably designed with a
flint or a shell), drawings by palaeolithic man, in the British Museum, I
have only observed one purely decorative attempt. Even in this the
decoration resembles an effort to use the outlines of foliage for
ornamental purposes. In almost all the other cases the palaeolithic
artist has not decorated his bits of bone in the usual savage manner, but
has treated his bone as an artist treats his sketch-book, and has
scratched outlines of beasts and fishes with his sharp shell as an artist
uses his point. These ancient bones, in short, are the sketch-books of
European savages, whose untaught skill was far greater than that of the
Australians, or even of the Eskimo. When brought into contact with
Europeans, the Australian and Eskimo very quickly, even without regular
teaching, learn to draw with some spirit and skill. In the Australian
stele, or grave-pillar, which we have engraved (Fig. 4), the shapeless
figures below the men and animals are the dead, and the boilyas or
ghosts. Observe the patterns in the interstices. The artist had lived
with Europeans. In their original conditions, however, the Australians
have not attained to such free, artist-like, and unhampered use of their
rude materials as the mysterious European artists who drew the mammoth
that walked abroad amongst them.
[Fig. 4. An Australian Stele: 283.jpg]
We have engraved one solitary Australian attempt at drawing curved lines.
The New Zealanders, a race far more highly endowed, and, when Europeans
arrived amongst them, already far more civilised than the Australians,
had, like the Australians, no metal implements. But their stone weapons
were harder and keener, and with these they engraved the various spirals
and coils on hard wood, of which we give examples here. It is sometimes
said that New Zealand culture and art have filtered from some Asiatic
source, and that in the coils and spirals designed, as in our engravings,
on the face of the Maori chief, or on his wooden furniture, there may be
found debased Asiatic influences. {286} This is one of the questions
which we can hardly deal with here. Perhaps its solution requires more
of knowledge, anthropological and linguistic, than is at present within
the reach of any student. Assuredly the races of the earth have wandered
far, and have been wonderfully intermixed, and have left the traces of
their passage here and there on sculptured stones, and in the keeping of
the ghosts that haunt ancient grave-steads. But when two pieces of
artistic work, one civilised, one savage, resemble each other, it is
always dangerous to suppose that the resemblance bears witness to
relationship or contact between the races, or to influences imported by
one from the other. New Zealand work may be Asiatic in origin, and
debased by the effect of centuries of lower civilisation and ruder
implements. Or Asiatic ornament may be a form of art improved out of
ruder forms, like those to which the New Zealanders have already
attained. One is sometimes almost tempted to regard the favourite Maori
spiral as an imitation of the form, not unlike that of a bishop's crozier
at the top, taken by the great native ferns. Examples of resemblance, to
be accounted for by the development of a crude early idea, may be traced
most easily in the early pottery of Greece. No one says that the Greeks
borrowed from the civilised people of America. Only a few enthusiasts
say that the civilised peoples of America, especially the Peruvians, are
Aryan by race. Yet the remains of Peruvian palaces are often by no means
dissimilar in style from the 'Pelasgic' and 'Cyclopean' buildings of
gigantic stones which remain on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and
Mycenae. The probability is that men living in similar social
conditions, and using similar implements, have unconsciously and
unintentionally arrived at like results.
[Fig 5. a, A Maori Design; b, Tattoo on a Maori's face: 285.jpg]
Few people who are interested in the question can afford to visit Peru
and Mycenae and study the architecture for themselves. But anyone who is
interested in the strange identity of the human mind everywhere, and in
the necessary forms of early art, can go to the British Museum and
examine the American and early Greek pottery. Compare the Greek key
pattern and the wave pattern on Greek and Mexican vases, and compare the
bird-faces, or human faces very like those of birds, with the similar
faces on the clay pots which Dr. Schliemann dug up at Troy. The latter
are engraved in his book on Troy. Compare the so-called 'cuttle-fish'
from a Peruvian jar with the same figure on the early Greek vases, most
of which are to be found in the last of the classical vase-rooms
upstairs. Once more, compare the little clay 'whorls' of the Mexican and
Peruvian room with those which Dr. Schliemann found so numerous at
Hissarlik. The conviction becomes irresistible that all these objects,
in shape, in purpose, in character of decoration, are the same, because
the mind and the materials of men, in their early stages of civilisation
especially, are the same everywhere. You might introduce old Greek bits
of clay-work, figures or vases, into a Peruvian collection, or might
foist Mexican objects among the clay treasures of Hissarlik, and the
wisest archaeologist would be deceived. The Greek fret pattern
especially seems to be one of the earliest that men learnt to draw. The
svastika, as it is called, the cross with lines at right angles to each
limb, is found everywhere--in India, Greece, Scotland, Peru--as a natural
bit of ornament. The allegorising fancy of the Indians gave it a mystic
meaning, and the learned have built I know not what worlds of religious
theories on this 'pre-Christian cross,' which is probably a piece of
hasty decorative work, with no original mystic meaning at all. {289}
Ornaments of this sort were transferred from wood or bone to clay, almost
as soon as people learned that early art, the potter's, to which the
Australians have not attained, though it was familiar to the not distant
people of New Caledonia. The style of spirals and curves, again, once
acquired (as it was by the New Zealanders), became the favourite of some
races, especially of the Celtic. Any one who will study either the
ornaments of Mycenae, or those of any old Scotch or Irish collection,
will readily recognise in that art the development of a system of
ornament like that of the Maoris. Classical Greece, on the other hand,
followed more in the track of the ancient system of straight and slanted
lines, and we do not find in the later Greek art that love of interlacing
coils and spirals which is so remarkable among the Celts, and which is
very manifest in the ornaments of the Mycaenean hoards--that is, perhaps,
of the ancient Greek heroic age. The causes of these differences in the
development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one
track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early motif, while
classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at
present to ascertain. But it is plain enough that later art has done
little more than develop ideas of ornament already familiar to untutored
races.
[Fig. 6. From a Maori's Face: 287.jpg]
It has been shown that the art which aims at decoration is better adapted
to both the purposes and materials of savages than the art which aims at
representation. As a rule, the materials of the lower savages are their
own bodies (which they naturally desire to make beautiful for ever by
tattooing), and the hard substances of which they fashion their tools and
weapons. These hard substances, when worked on with cutting instruments
of stone or shell, are most easily adorned with straight cut lines, and
spirals are therefore found to be, on the whole, a comparatively late
form of ornament.
[Fig. 7. Bushman Dog: 290.jpg]
We have now to discuss the efforts of the savage to represent. Here,
again, we have to consider the purpose which animates him, and the
materials which are at his service. His pictures have a practical
purpose, and do not spring from what we are apt, perhaps too hastily, to
consider the innate love of imitation for its own sake. In modern art,
in modern times, no doubt the desire to imitate nature, by painting or
sculpture, has become almost an innate impulse, an in-born instinct. But
there must be some 'reason why' for this; and it does not seem at all
unlikely that we inherit the love, the disinterested love, of imitative
art from very remote ancestors, whose habits of imitation had a direct,
interested, and practical purpose. The member of Parliament who mimics
the crowing of a cock during debate, or the street boy who beguiles his
leisure by barking like a dog, has a disinterested pleasure in the
exercise of his skill; but advanced thinkers seem pretty well agreed that
the first men who imitated the voices of dogs, and cocks, and other
animals, did not do so merely for fun, but with the practical purpose of
indicating to their companions the approach of these creatures. Such
were the rude beginnings of human language: and whether that theory be
correct or not, there are certainly practical reasons which impel the
savage to attempt imitative art. I doubt if there are many savage races
which do not use representative art for the purposes of writing--that is,
to communicate information to persons whom they cannot reach by the
voice, and to assist the memory, which, in a savage, is perhaps not very
strong. To take examples. A savage man meets a savage maid. She does
not speak his language, nor he hers. How are they to know whether,
according to the marriage laws of their race, they are lawful mates for
each other? This important question is settled by an inspection of their
tattooed marks. If a Thlinkeet man of the Swan stock meets an Iroquois
maid of the Swan stock they cannot speak to each other, and the 'gesture
language' is cumbrous. But if both are tattooed with the swan, then the
man knows that this daughter of the swan is not for him. He could no
more marry her than Helen of Troy could have married Castor, the tamer of
horses. Both are children of the Swan, as were Helen and Castor, and
must regard each other as brother and sister. The case of the Thlinkeet
man and the Iroquois maid is extremely unlikely to occur; but I give it
as an example of the practical use among savages, of representative art.
[Fig. 8. Red Indian Picture-Writing - The Legend of Manabozho: 293.jpg]
Among the uses of art for conveying intelligence we notice that even the
Australians have what the Greeks would have called the [Greek], a staff
on which inscriptions, legible to the Aborigines, are engraven. I
believe, however, that the Australian [Greek] is not usually marked with
picture-writing, but with notches--even more difficult to decipher. As
an example of Red Indian picture-writing we publish a scroll from Kohl's
book on the natives of North America. This rude work of art, though the
reader may think little of it, is really a document as important in its
way as the Chaldaean clay tablets inscribed with the record of the
Deluge. The coarsely-drawn figures recall, to the artist's mind, much of
the myth of Manabozho, the Prometheus and the Deucalion, the Cain and the
Noah of the dwellers by the great lake. Manabozho was a great chief, who
had two wives that quarrelled. The two stumpy half-figures (4) represent
the wives; the mound between them is the displeasure of Manabozho.
Further on (5) you see him caught up between two trees--an unpleasant
fix, from which the wolves and squirrels refused to extricate him. The
kind of pyramid with a figure at top (8) is a mountain, on which when the
flood came, Manabozho placed his grandmother to be out of the water's
way. The somewhat similar object is Manabozho himself, on the top of his
mountain. The animals you next behold (10) were sent out by Manabozho to
ascertain how the deluge was faring, and to carry messages to his
grandmother. This scroll was drawn, probably on birch bark, by a Red Man
of literary attainments, who gave it to Kohl (in its lower right-hand
corner (11) he has pictured the event), that he might never forget the
story of the Manabozhian deluge. The Red Indians have always, as far as
European knowledge goes, been in the habit of using this picture-writing
for the purpose of retaining their legends, poems, and incantations. It
is unnecessary to say that the picture-writing of Mexico and the
hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt are derived from the same savage
processes. I must observe that the hasty indications of the figure used
in picture-writing are by no means to be regarded as measures of the Red
Men's skill in art. They can draw much better than the artist who
recorded the Manabozhian legend, when they please.
In addition to picture-writing, Religion has fostered savage
representative art. If a man worships a lizard or a bear, he finds it
convenient to have an amulet or idol representing a bear or a lizard. If
one adores a lizard or a bear, one is likely to think that prayer and
acts of worship addressed to an image of the animal will please the
animal himself, and make him propitious. Thus the art of making little
portable figures of various worshipful beings is fostered, and the craft
of working in wood or ivory is born. As a rule, the savage is satisfied
with excessively rude representations of his gods. Objects of this
kind--rude hewn blocks of stone and wood--were the most sacred effigies
of the gods in Greece, and were kept in the dimmest recesses of the
temple. No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared
so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with
the head of a mare. The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are
scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked
Admiralty Islanders. But this is anticipating; in the meantime it may be
said that among the sources of savage representative art are the need of
something like writing, and ideas suggested by nascent religion.
[Fig. 9. Bushman Wall-Painting: 295.jpg]
The singular wall-picture (Fig. 9) from a cave in South Africa, which we
copy from the 'Cape Monthly Magazine,' probably represents a magical
ceremony. Bushmen are tempting a great water animal--a rhinoceros, or
something of that sort--to run across the land, for the purpose of
producing rain. The connection of ideas is scarcely apparent to
civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the connection
between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has been hanged and
success at cards--a common French superstition. The Bushman
cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black, red, and
white. Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and like
children, draw animals much better than the human figure. The Bushman
dog in our little engraving (Fig. 7) is all alive--almost as full of life
as the dog which accompanies the centaur Chiron, in that beautiful vase
in the British Museum which represents the fostering of Achilles. The
Bushman wall-paintings, like those of Australia, seem to prove that
savage art is capable of considerable freedom, when supplied with fitting
materials. Men seem to draw better when they have pigments and a flat
surface of rock to work upon, than when they are scratching on hard wood
with a sharp edge of a broken shell. Though the thing has little to do
with art, it may be worth mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the
labyrinthine Australian caves are decorated, here and there, with the
mark of a red hand. The same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red
hand is impressed on the walls of the ruined palaces and temples of
Yucatan--the work of a vanished people.
[Fig. 10. Palaelithic art: 297.jpg]
There is one singular fact in the history of savage art which reminds us
that savages, like civilised men, have various degrees of culture and
various artistic capacities. The oldest inhabitants of Europe who have
left any traces of their lives and handiwork must have been savages.
Their tools and weapons were not even formed of polished stone, but of
rough-hewn flint. The people who used tools of this sort must
necessarily have enjoyed but a scanty mechanical equipment, and the life
they lived in caves from which they had to drive the cave-bear, and among
snows where they stalked the reindeer and the mammoth, must have been
very rough. These earliest known Europeans, 'palaeolithic men,' as they
called, from their use of the ancient unpolished stone weapons, appear to
have inhabited the countries now known as France and England, before the
great Age of Ice. This makes their date one of incalculable antiquity;
they are removed from us by a 'dark backward and abysm of time.' The
whole Age of Ice, the dateless period of the polishers of stone weapons,
the arrival of men using weapons of bronze, the time which sufficed to
change the climate and fauna and flora of Western Europe, lie between us
and palaeolithic man. Yet in him we must recognise a skill more akin to
the spirit of modern art than is found in any other savage race.
Palaeolithic man, like other savages, decorated his weapons; but, as I
have already said, he did not usually decorate them in the common savage
manner with ornamental patterns. He scratched on bits of bone spirited
representations of all the animals whose remains are found mixed with his
own. He designed the large-headed horse of that period, and science
inclines to believe that he drew the breed correctly. His sketches of
the mammoth, the reindeer, the bear, and of many fishes, may be seen in
the British Museum, or engraved in such works as Professor Boyd Dawkins's
'Early Man in Britain.' The object from which our next illustration
(Fig. 12) was engraved represents a deer, and was a knife-handle. Eyes
at all trained in art can readily observe the wonderful spirit and
freedom of these ancient sketches. They are the rapid characteristic
work of true artists who know instinctively what to select and what to
sacrifice.
[Fig 12. Palaeolithic art - a knife-handle: 299.jpg]
Some learned men, Mr. Boyd Dawkins among them, believe that the Eskimo,
that stunted hunting and fishing race of the Western Arctic circle, are
descendants of the palaeolithic sketchers, and retain their artistic
qualities. Other inquirers, with Mr. Geikie and Dr. Wilson, do not
believe in this pedigree of the Eskimo. I speak not with authority, but
the submission of ignorance, and as one who has no right to an opinion
about these deep matters of geology and ethnology. But to me, Mr.
Geikie's arguments appear distinctly the more convincing, and I cannot
think it demonstrated that the Eskimo are descended from our old
palaeolithic artists. But if Mr. Boyd Dawkins is right, if the Eskimo
derive their lineage from the artists of the Dordogne, then the Eskimo
are sadly degenerated. In Mr. Dawkins's 'Early Man' is an Eskimo drawing
of a reindeer hunt, and a palaeolithic sketch of a reindeer; these (by
permission of the author and Messrs. Macmillan) we reproduce. Look at
the vigour and life of the ancient drawing--the feathering hair on the
deer's breast, his head, his horns, the very grasses at his feet, are
touched with the graver of a true artist (Fig. 14). The design is like a
hasty memorandum of Leech's. Then compare the stiff formality of the
modern Eskimo drawing (Fig. 13). It is rather like a record, a piece of
picture-writing, than a free sketch, a rapid representation of what is
most characteristic in nature. Clearly, if the Eskimo come from
palaeolithic man, they are a degenerate race as far as art is concerned.
Yet, as may be seen in Dr. Rink's books, the Eskimo show considerable
skill when they have become acquainted with European methods and models,
and they have at any rate a greater natural gift for design than the Red
Indians, of whose sacred art the Thunderbird brooding over page 298 is a
fair example. The Red Men believe in big birds which produce thunder.
Quahteaht, the Adam of Vancouver's Island, married one, and this (Fig.
11) is she.
[Fig. 11. Red Indian art - the Thunderbird: 298.jpg]
[Fig. 13. Eskimo Drawing - A Reindeer hunt: 300.jpg]
[Fig. 14. Palaeolithic sketch - a reindeer: 301.jpg]
We have tried to show how savage decorative art supplied the first ideas
of patterns which were developed in various ways by the decorative art of
advancing civilisation. The same progress might be detected in
representative art. Books, like the guide-book to ancient Greece which
Pausanias wrote before the glory had quite departed, prove that the Greek
temples were museums in which the development of art might be clearly
traced. Furthest back in the series of images of gods came things like
that large stone which was given to Cronus when he wished to swallow his
infant child Zeus, and which he afterwards vomited up with his living
progeny. This fetich-stone was preserved at Delphi. Next came wild
bulks of beast-headed gods, like the horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia,
and it seems possible enough that there was an Artemis with the head of a
she-bear. Gradually the bestial characteristics dropped, and there
appeared such rude anthropomorphic images of Apollo--more like South Sea
idols than the archer prince--as are now preserved in Athens. Next we
have the stage of semi-savage realism, which is represented by the
metopes of Selinus in Sicily, now in the British Museum, and by not a few
gems and pieces of gold work. Greek temples have fallen, and the statues
of the gods exist only in scattered fragments. But in the representative
collection of casts belonging to the Cambridge Archaeological Museum, one
may trace the career of Greek art backwards from Phidias to the rude
idol.
'Savage realism' is the result of a desire to represent an object as it
is known to be, and not as it appears. Thus Catlin, among the Red
Indians, found that the people refused to be drawn in profile. They knew
they had two eyes, and in profile they seemed only to have one. Look at
the Selinus marbles, and you will observe that figures, of which the body
is seen in profile, have the full face turned to the spectator. Again,
the savage knows that an animal has two sides; both, he thinks, should be
represented, but he cannot foreshorten, and he finds the profile view
easiest to draw. To satisfy his need of realism he draws a beast's head
full-face, and gives to the one head two bodies drawn in profile.
Examples of this are frequent in very archaic Greek gems and gold work,
and Mr. A. S. Murray suggests (as I understand him) that the attitude of
the two famous lions, which guarded vainly Agamemnon's gate at Mycenae,
is derived from the archaic double-bodied and single-headed beast of
savage realism. Very good examples of these oddities may be found in the
'Journal of the Hellenic Society,' 1881, pl. xv. Here are double-bodied
and single headed birds, monsters, and sphinxes. We engrave (Fig. 15)
three Greek gems from the islands as examples of savagery in early Greek
art. In the oblong gem the archers are rather below the Red Indian
standard of design. The hunter figured in the first gem is almost up to
the Bushman mark. In his dress ethnologists will recognise an
arrangement now common among the natives of New Caledonia. In the third
gem the woman between two swans may be Leda, or she may represent Leto in
Delos. Observe the amazing rudeness of the design, and note the modern
waist and crinoline. The artists who engraved these gems on hard stone
had, of necessity, much better tools than any savages possess, but their
art was truly savage. To discover how Greek art climbed in a couple of
centuries from this coarse and childish work to the grace of the AEgina
marbles, and thence to the absolute freedom and perfect unapproachable
beauty of the work of Phidias, is one of the most singular problems in
the history of art. Greece learned something, no doubt, from her early
knowledge of the arts the priests of Assyria and Egypt had elaborated in
the valleys of the Euphrates and the Nile. That might account for a
swift progress from savage to formal and hieratic art; but whence sprang
the inspiration which led her so swiftly on to art that is perfectly
free, natural, and god-like? It is a mystery of race, and of a divine
gift. 'The heavenly gods have given it to mortals.'
[Fig. 15. Archaic Greek Gems: 303.jpg]
Footnotes:
{3a} Compare De Cara: Essame Critico, xx. i.
{3b} Revue de l'Hist. des Rel. ii. 136.
{4} Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte, p. 431.
{5} Prim. Cult. i. 394.
{11a} A study of the contemporary stone age in Scotland will be found in
Mitchell's Past and Present.
{11b} About twenty years ago, the widow of an Irish farmer, in Derry,
killed her deceased husband's horse. When remonstrated with by her
landlord, she said, 'Would you have my man go about on foot in the next
world?' She was quite in the savage intellectual stage.
{12} At the solemn festival suppers, ordained for the honour of the
gods, they forget not to serve up certain dishes of young whelp's flesh.
(Pliny, H. N. xxix. 4.)
{15} Nov. 1880.
{18} 'Ah, once again may I plant the great fan on her corn-heap, while
she stands smiling by, Demeter of the threshing floor, with sheaves and
poppies in her hands' (Theocritus, vii. 155-157).
{20} Odyssey, xi. 32.
{28} Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel., vol. ii.
{33} Pausanias, iii. 15. When the boys were being cruelly scourged, the
priestess of Artemis Orthia held an ancient barbaric wooden image of the
goddess in her hands. If the boys were spared, the image grew heavy; the
more they were tortured, the lighter grew the image. In Samoa the image
(shark's teeth) of the god Taema is consulted before battle. 'If it felt
heavy, that was a bad omen; if light, the sign was good'--the god was
pleased (Turner's Samoa, p. 55).
[Bull-roarer: 35.jpg]
{34} Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 268.
{35} Fison, Journal Anthrop. Soc., Nov. 1883.
{36a} Taylor's New Zealand, p. 181.
{36b} This is not the view of le Pere Lafitau, a learned Jesuit
missionary in North America, who wrote (1724) a work on savage manners,
compared with the manners of heathen antiquity. Lafitau, who was greatly
struck with the resemblances between Greek and Iroquois or Carib
initiations, takes Servius's other explanation of the mystica vannus, 'an
osier vessel containing rural offerings of first fruits.' This exactly
answers, says Lafitau, to the Carib Matoutou, on which they offer sacred
cassava cakes.
{37} The Century Magazine, May 1883.
{39} [Greek]. Lobeck, Aglaophamus (i. p. 700).
{40a} De Corona, p. 313.
{40b} Savage Africa. Captain Smith, the lover of Pocahontas, mentions
the custom in his work on Virginia, pp. 245-248.
{40c} Brough Smyth, i. 60, using evidence of Howitt, Taplin, Thomas, and
Wilhelmi.
{41a} Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 214.
{41b} [Greek], c. 15.
{42} Cape Monthly Magazine, July 1874.
{44} Wallace, Travels on the Amazon, p. 349.
{46a} New Zealand, Taylor, pp. 119-121. Die heilige Sage der
Polynesier, Bastian, pp. 36-39.
{46b} A crowd of similar myths, in one of which a serpent severs Heaven
and Earth, are printed in Turner's Samoa.
{48} The translation used is Jowett's.
{49a} Theog., 166.
{49b} Apollodorus, i. 15.
{50a} Primitive Culture, i. 325.
{50b} Pauthier, Livres sacres de l'Orient, p. 19.
{50c} Muir's Sanskrit Texts, v. 23. Aitareya Brahmana.
{52a} Hesiod, Theog., 497.
{52b} Paus. x. 24.
{54a} Bleek, Bushman Folklore, pp. 6-8.
{54b} Theal, Kaffir Folklore, pp. 161-167.
{54c} Brough Smith, i. 432-433.
{55a} i. 338.
{55b} Rel. de la Nouvelle-France (1636), p. 114.
{56} Codrington, in Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881. There is a Breton
Marchen of a land where people had to 'bring the Dawn' daily with carts
and horses. A boy, whose sole property was a cock, sold it to the people
of this country for a large sum, and now the cock brings the dawn, with a
great saving of trouble and expense. The Marchen is a survival of the
state of mind of the Solomon Islanders.
{58a} Selected Essays, i. 460.
{58b} Ibid. i. 311.
{59} Ueber Entwicklungsstufen der Mythenbildung (1874), p. 148.
{60a} ii. 127.
{60b} G. D. M., ii. 127, 129.
{61a} Gr. My., i. 144.
{61b} De Abst., ii. 202, 197.
{61c} Rel. und Myth., ii. 3.
{61d} Ursprung der Myth., pp. 133, 135, 139, 149.
{62a} Contemporary Review, Sept. 1883.
{62b} Rev. de l'Hist. rel. i. 179.
{65} That Pururavas is regarded as a mortal man, in relations with some
sort of spiritual mistress, appears from the poem itself (v. 8, 9, 18).
The human character of Pururavas also appears in R. V. i. 31, 4.
{66a} Selected Essays, i. 408.
{66b} The Apsaras is an ideally beautiful fairy woman, something
'between the high gods and the lower grotesque beings,' with 'lotus eyes'
and other agreeable characteristics. A list of Apsaras known by name is
given in Meyer's Gandharven-Kentauren, p. 28. They are often regarded as
cloud-maidens by mythologists.
{68} Selected Essays, i. p. 405.
{69a} Cf. ruber, rufus, O. H. G. rot, rudhira, [Greek]; also Sanskrit,
ravi, sun.
{69b} Myth. Ar. Nat., ii. 81.
{69c} R. V. iii. 29, 3.
{69d} The passage alluded to in Homer does not mean that dawn 'ends' the
day, but 'when the fair-tressed Dawn brought the full light of the third
day' (Od., v. 390).
{70a} Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, 241) is reminded by Pururavas (in
Roth's sense of der Bruller) of loud-thundering Zeus, [Greek].
{70b} Herabkunft des Fetters, p. 86-89.
{71} Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 241) notices the reference to the
'custom of women.' But he thinks the clause a mere makeshift, introduced
late to account for a prohibition of which the real meaning had been
forgotten. The improbability of this view is indicated by the frequency
of similar prohibitions in actual custom.
{72} Astley, Collection of Voyages, ii. 24. This is given by Bluet and
Moore on the evidence of one Job Ben Solomon, a native of Bunda in Futa.
'Though Job had a daughter by his last wife, yet he never saw her without
her veil, as having been married to her only two years.' Excellently as
this prohibition suits my theory, yet I confess I do not like Job's
security.
{73a} Brough Smyth, i. 423.
{73b} Bowen, Central Africa, p. 303.
{73c} Lafitau, i. 576.
{73d} Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation (1875), p. 75.
{74a} Chansons Pop. Bulg., p. 172.
{74b} Lectures on Language, Second Series, p. 41.
{75a} J. A. Farrer, Primitive Manners, p. 202, quoting Seemann.
{75b} Sebillot, Contes Pop. de la Haute-Bretagne, p. 183.
{76a} Gervase of Tilbury.
{76b} Kuhn, Herabkunft, p. 92.
{77} Chips, ii. 251.
{80a} Kitchi Gami, p. 105.
{80b} The sun-frog occurs seven times in Sir G. W: Cox's Mythology of
the Aryan Peoples, and is used as an example to prove that animals in
myth are usually the sun, like Bheki, 'the sun-frog.'
{81a} Dalton's Ethnol. of Bengal, pp. 165, 166.
{81b} Taylor, New Zealand, p. 143.
{82a} Liebrecht gives a Hindoo example, Zur Volkskunde, p. 239.
{82b} Cymmrodor, iv. pt. 2.
{82c} Prim. Cult., i. 140.
{83a} Primitive Manners, p. 256.
{83b} See Meyer, Gandharven-Kentauren, Benfey, Pantsch., i. 263.
{84a} Selected Essays, i. 411.
{84b} Callaway, p. 63.
{84c} Ibid., p. 119.
{87} Primitive Culture, i. 357: 'The savage sees individual stars as
animate beings, or combines star-groups into living celestial creatures,
or limbs of them, or objects connected with them.'
{88} This formula occurs among Bushmen and Eskimo (Bleek and Rink).
{92} The events of the flight are recorded correctly in the Gaelic
variant 'The Battle of the Birds.' (Campbell, Tales of the West
Highlands, vol. i. p. 25.)
{93a} Ralston, Russian Folk Tales, 132; Kohler, Orient und Occident, ii.
107, 114.
{93b} Ko ti ki, p. 36.
{93c} Callaway, pp. 51, 53, 64, 145, 228.
{93d} See also 'Petrosinella' in the Pentamerone, and 'The Mastermaid'
in Dasent's Tales from the Norse.
{93e} Folk-Lore Journal, August 1883.
{95} Poetae Minores Gr. ii.
{96} Mythol. Ar., ii. 150.
{97a} Gr. My., ii. 318.
{97b} Sonne, Mond und Sterne, pp. 213, 229.
{99a} This proves that the tale belongs to the pre-Christian cannibal
age.
{99b} Turner's Samoa, p. 102. In this tale only the names of the
daughters are translated; they mean 'white fish' and 'dark fish.'
{99c} Folk-Lore Journal, August 1883.
{101} Schoolcraft, Algic Researches, ii. 94-104.
{102a} Nature, March 14, 1884.
{102b} The earlier part of the Jason cycle is analysed in the author's
preface to Grimm's Marchen (Bell & Sons).
{104a} Comm. Real. i. 75.
{104b} See Early History of the Family, infra.
{105a} The names Totem and Totemism have been in use at least since
1792, among writers on the North American tribes. Prof. Max Muller
(Academy, Jan. 1884) says the word should be, not Totem, but Ote or Otem.
Long, an interpreter among the Indians, introduced the word Totamism in
1792.
{105b} Christoval de Moluna (1570), p. 5.
{105c} Cieza de Leon, p. 183.
{105d} Idyll xv.
{107} Sayce, Herodotos, p. 344; Herodotus, ii. 42; Wilkinson's Ancient
Egyptians (1878, ii. 475, note 2); Plutarch, De Is. et Os., 71, 72;
Athenaeus, vii. 299; Strabo, xvii. 813.
{108a} The Mouse, according to Dalton, is still a totem among the Oraons
of Bengal. A man of the Mouse 'motherhood,' as the totem kindred is
locally styled, may not eat mice (esteemed a delicacy), nor marry a girl
who is a Mouse.
{108b} xiii. 604. Casaub. 1620.
{108c} There were Sminthiac feasts at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete
(De Witte, Revue Numismatique, N.S. iii. 3-11).
{109a} Iliad, i. 39.
{109b} AElian, H. A. xii. 5.
{110a} The bas-relief is published in Paoli's Della Religione de'
Gentili, Naples, 1771, p. 9; also by Fabretti, Ad Cal. Oper. de Colum.
Trajan. p. 315. Paoli's book was written after the discovery in
Neapolitan territory of a small bronze image, hieratic in character,
representing a man with a mouse on his hand. Paoli's engraving of this
work of art, unluckily, does not enable us to determine its date or
_provenance_. The book is a mine of mouse-lore.
{110b} Colden, History of the Five Nations, p. 15 (1727).
{110c} Onomast., ix. 6, segm. 84, p. 1066.
{110d} De Witte says Pollux was mistaken here. In the Revue
Numismatique, N.S. iii., De Witte publishes coins of Alexandria, the more
ancient Hamaxitus, in the Troad. The Sminthian Apollo is represented
with his bow, and the mouse on his hand. Other coins show the god with
the mouse at his foot, or show us the lyre of Apollo supported by mice. A
bronze coin in the British Museum gives Apollo with the mouse beside his
foot.
{111a} Spanheim, ad Fl. Joseph., vi. I, p. 312.
{111b} Della Rel., p. 174.
{111c} Herodotus, ii. 141.
{112a} Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 13, quoting Journal Asiatique, 1st
series, 3, 307) finds the same myth in Chinese annals. It is not a god,
however, but the king of the rats, who appears to the distressed monarch
in his dream. Rats then gnaw the bowstrings of his enemies. The
invaders were Turks, the rescued prince a king of Khotan. The king
raised a temple, and offered sacrifice--to the rats?
{112b} Herodotos, p. 204.
{113a} Wilkinson, iii. 294, quoting the Ritual xxxiii.: 'Thou devourest
the abominable rat of Ra, or the sun.'
{113b} Mr. Loftie has kindly shown me a green mouse containing the
throne-name of Thothmes III. The animals thus used as substitutes for
scarabs were also sacred, as the fish, rhinoceros, fly, all represented
in Mr. Loftie's collection. See his Essay of Scarabs, p. 27. It may be
admitted that, in a country where Cats were gods, the religion of the
Mouse must have been struggling and oppressed.
[Illustration: 113.jpg]
{114a} Strabo, xiii. 604.
{114b} Eustathius on Iliad, i. 39.
{114c} A Strange and True Relation of the Prodigious Multitude of Mice,
1670.
{115a} Journal of Philol., xvii. p. 96.
{115b} Leviticus xi. 29.
{116} Samuel i. 5, 6.
{117a} Zool. Myth, ii. 68.
{117b} Melusine, N.S. i.
{118a} De Iside et Osiride, lxxvi.
{118b} This hypothesis does not maintain that totemism prevailed in
Greece during historic times. Though Plutarch mentions an Athenian
[Greek], the Ioxidae, which claimed descent from and revered asparagus,
it is probable that genuine totemism had died out of Greece many hundreds
of years before even Homer's time. But this view is not inconsistent
with the existence of survivals in religion and ritual.
{119} Rolland, Faune populaire.
{121} The attempt is not to explain the origin of each separate name but
only of the general habit of giving animal or human names stars.
{125} Mr. Herbert Spencer believes that the Australians were once more
civilised than at present. But there has never been found a trace of
pottery on the Australian continent, which says little for their
civilisation in the past.
{128} Brugsch, History of Egypt, i. 32.
{130} Brough Smith.
{131} Amazonian Tortoise Myths, p. 39.
{132a} Sahagun, vii. 3.
{132b} Grimm, D. M., Engl. transl., p. 716.
{133} Hartt, op. cit., p. 40.
{134a} Kaegi, Der Rig Veda, p. 217.
{134b} Mainjo-i-Khard, 49, 22, ed. West.
{134c} Op. cit. p. 98.
{137} Prim. Cult., i. 357.
{140} Lectures on Language, pp. 359, 362.
{144} Grimm, D. M., Engl., Trans. p. 1202.
{145} Tom Sawyer, p. 87.
{146a} Rep. vi. 488. Dem. 10, 6.
{146b} Journal Anthrop. Inst., Feb. 1881.
{147a} Gregor, Folklore of North-east Counties, p, 40.
{147b} Wars of Jews, vii. 6, 3.
{147c} Var. Hist., 14, 27.
{148} Max Muller, Selected Essays, ii. 622.
{151} Myth of Kirke, p. 80.
{152a} Turner's Samoa.
{152b} Josephus, loc. cit. For this, and many other references, I am
indebted to Schwartz's Prahistorisch-anthropologische Studien. In most
magic herbs the learned author recognises thunder and lightning--a theory
no less plausible than Mr. Brown's.
{152c} Lib. xxviii.
{152d} Schoolcraft.
{157a} Talvj, Charakteristik der Volkslieder, p. 3.
{157b} Fauriel, Chants de la Grece moderne.
{160} Thus Scotland scarcely produced any ballads, properly speaking,
after the Reformation. The Kirk suppressed the dances to whose motion
the ballad was sung in Scotland, as in Greece, Provence, and France.
{161} L. Preller's Ausgewahlte Aufsatze. Greek ideas on the origin of
Man. It is curious that the myth of a gold, a silver, and a copper race
occurs in South America. See Brasseur de Bourbourg's Notes on the Popol
Vuh.
{164a} See essay on Early History of the Family.
{164b} This constant struggle may be, and of course by one school of
comparative mythologists will be, represented as the strife between light
and darkness, the sun's rays, and the clouds of night, and so on. M.
Castren has well pointed out that the struggle has really an historical
meaning. Even if the myth be an elementary one, its constructors must
have been in the exogamous stage of society.
{169} Sampo _may_ be derived from a Thibetan word, meaning 'fountain of
good,' or it may possibly be connected with the Swedish Stamp, a hand-
mill. The talisman is made of all the quaint odds and ends that the
Fetichist treasures: swan's feathers, flocks of wool, and so on.
{170} Sir G. W. Cox's Popular Romances of the Middle Ages, p. 19.
{171} Fortnightly Review, 1869: 'The Worship of Plants and Animals.'
{176} Mr. McLennan in the Fortnightly Review, February 1870.
{178} M. Schmidt, Volksleben der Neugriechen, finds comparatively few
traces of the worship of Zeus, and these mainly in proverbial
expressions.
{183} Preller, Ausgewahlte Aufsatze, p. 154.
{184a} Tylor, Prim. Cult., ii. 156. Pinkerton, vii. 357.
{184b} Universities Mission to Central Africa, p. 217. Prim. Cult,, ii.
156, 157.
{186} Quoted in 'Jacob's Rod': London, n.d., a translation of La Verge
de Jacob, Lyon, 1693.
{190} Lettres sur la Baguette, pp. 106-112.
{200} Turner's Samoa, pp, 77, 119.
{201} Cox, Mythol. of Aryan Races, passim.
{202a} See examples in 'A Far-travelled Tale,' 'Cupid and Psyche,' and
'The Myth of Cronus.'
{202b} Trubner, 1881.
{203a} Hahn, p. 23.
{203b} Ibid., p. 45.
{204} Expedition, i. 166.
{205} Herodotus, ii.
{209} See Fetichism and the Infinite.
{211} Sacred Books of the East, xii. 130, 131,
{218} Lectures on Language. Second series, p. 41.
{222} A defence of the evidence for our knowledge of savage faiths,
practices, and ideas will be found in Primitive Culture, i. 9-11.
{223} A third reference to Pausanias I have been unable to verify. There
are several references to Greek fetich-stones in Theophrastus's account
of the Superstitious Man. A number of Greek sacred stones named by
Pausanias may be worth noticing. In Boeotia (ix. 16), the people
believed that Alcmene, mother of Heracles, was changed into a stone. The
Thespians worshipped, under the name of Eros, an unwrought stone,
[Greek], 'their most ancient sacred object' (ix. 27). The people of
Orchomenos 'paid extreme regard to certain stones,' said to have fallen
from heaven, 'or to certain figures made of stone that descended from the
sky' (ix. 38). Near Chaeronea, Rhea was said to have deceived Cronus, by
offering him, in place of Zeus, a stone wrapped in swaddling bands. This
stone, which Cronus vomited forth after having swallowed it, was seen by
Pausanias at Delphi (ix. 41). By the roadside, near the city of the
Panopeans, lay the stones out of which Prometheus made men (x. 4). The
stone swallowed in place of Zeus by his father lay at the exit from the
Delphian temple, and was anointed (compare the action of Jacob, Gen.
xxviii. 18) with oil every day. The Phocians worshipped thirty squared
stones, each named after a god (vii. xxii.). '_Among all the Greeks rude
stones were worshipped before the images of the gods_.' Among the
Troezenians a sacred stone lay in front of the temple, whereon the
Troezenian elders sat, and purified Orestes from the murder of his
mother. In Attica there was a conical stone worshipped as Apollo (i.
xliv.). Near Argos was a stone called Zeus Cappotas, on which Orestes
was said to have sat down, and so recovered peace of mind. Such are
examples of the sacred stones, the oldest worshipful objects, of Greece.
{226} See essays on 'Apollo and the Mouse' and 'The Early History of the
Family.'
{230} Here I may mention a case illustrating the motives of the fetich-
worshipper. My friend, Mr. J. J. Atkinson, who has for many years
studied the manners of the people of New Caledonia, asked a native _why_
he treasured a certain fetich-stone. The man replied that, in one of the
vigils which are practised beside the corpses of deceased friends, he saw
a lizard. The lizard is a totem, a worshipful animal in New Caledonia.
The native put out his hand to touch it, when it disappeared and left a
stone in its place. This stone he therefore held sacred in the highest
degree. Here then a fetich-stone was indicated as such by a spirit in
form of a lizard.
{233a} Much the same theory is propounded in Mr. Muller's lectures on
'The Science of Religion.'
{233b} The idea is expressed in a well known parody of Wordsworth, about
the tree which
'Will grow ten times as tall as me
And live ten times as long.'
{236} See Essay on 'The Early History of the Family.'
{241} Bergaigne's La Religion Vedique may be consulted for Vedic
Fetichism.
{247a} Early Law and Custom.
{247b} Studies in Ancient History, p. 127.
{248} Descent of Man, ii. 362.
{249} Early Law and Custom, p. 210.
{250a} Here I would like to point out that Mr. M'Lennan's theory was not
so hard and fast as his manner (that of a very assured believer in his
own ideas) may lead some inquirers to suppose. Sir Henry Maine writes,
that both Mr. Morgan and Mr. M'Lennan 'seem to me to think that human
society went everywhere through the same series of changes, and Mr.
M'Lennan, at any rate, expresses himself as if all those stages could be
clearly discriminated from one another, and the close of one and the
commencement of another announced with the distinctness of the clock-bell
telling the end of the hour.' On the other hand, I remember Mr.
M'Lennan's saying that, in his opinion, 'all manner of arrangements
probably went on simultaneously in different places.' In Studies in
Ancient History, p. 127, he expressly guards against the tendency 'to
assume that the progress of the various races of men from savagery has
been a uniform progress: that all the stages which any of them has gone
through have been passed in their order by all.' Still more to the point
is his remark on polyandry among the very early Greeks and other Aryans;
'it is quite consistent with my view that in all these quarters (Persia,
Sparta, Troy, Lycia, Attica, Crete, &c.) monandry, and even the patria
potestas, may have prevailed at points.'
{250b} Early Law and Custom, p. 212.
{251} Studies in Ancient History, pp. 140-147.
{252} Totem is the word generally given by travellers and interpreters
for the family crests of the Red Indians. Cf. p. 105.
{256} Domestic Manners of the Chinese, i. 99.
{258} Fortnightly Review, June 1, 1877.
{259} Kamilaroi and Kurnai. Natives call these objects their kin, 'of
one flesh' with them.
{260} Studies, p. 11.
{265a} O'Curry, Manners of Ancient Irish, l. ccclxx., quoting Trin.
Coll. Dublin MS.
{265b} See also Elton's Origins of English History, pp. 299-301.
{265c} Kemble's Saxons in England, p. 258. Politics of Aristotle,
Bolland and Lang, p. 99. {265d}
{265d} Mr. Grant Allen kindly supplied me some time ago with a list of
animal and vegetable names preserved in the titles of ancient English
village settlements. Among them are: ash, birch, bear (as among the
Iroquois), oak, buck, fir, fern, sun, wolf, thorn, goat, horse, salmon
(the trout is a totem in America), swan (familiar in Australia), and
others.
{267} 'Gentiles sunt qui inter se eodem nomine sunt. Qui ab ingeniis
oriundi sunt. Quorum majorum nemo servitutem servivit. Qui capite non
sunt deminuti.'
{268} Studies in Ancient History, p. 212.
{270} Fortnightly Review, October 1869: 'Archaeologia Americana,' ii.
113.
{273a} Suidas, 3102.
{273b} Herod., i. 173.
{273c} Cf. Bachofen, p. 309.
{273d} Compare the Irish Nennius, p. 127.
{276} The illustrations in this article are for the most part copied, by
permission of Messrs. Cassell & Co., from the Magazine of Art, in which
the essay appeared.
{286} Part of the pattern (Fig. 5, b) recurs on the New Zealand Bull-
roarer, engraved in the essay on the Bull-roarer.
[Bull-roarer: 35.jpg]
{289} See Schliemann's Troja, wherein is much learning and fancy about
the Aryan Svastika.