of the most common purposes of primitive drawing is to convey information by pictures. The " petroglyphs," or rock-inscriptions, which occur abundantly in Northern Asia and in many parts of North and South America, are drawings, more or less rude, com memorative of the exploits of warriors or of the migrations of tribes. Their general drift may sometimes be recovered by comparing them with the conventional figures of other nations in the same stage of culture, and with those elements of the gesture-language which are the common property of the race (comp. pi. 32, 2).
Decoration on pottery was invented the soft clay offered a favorable surface for receiving and retaining the designs of the native decorators. For the study of the principles of primitive line-work no class of relics offers such a field as a collection of savage ceramics. When specimens from localities wide asunder are compared, the frequent similarities in the ornamentation testify forcibly to the narrow limits of man's inventive capacity. The lines are usually straight, meeting at angles, recurring in set patterns, and produced by similar agencies, as a sharp-pointed stick or the finger-nail. Curves are rare, and actual figures belong to a comparatively late period. Greek patterns, or " grecques," where the lines are broken to form angular figures, repeated one after another, are to be classed among the earliest compositions. They are seen on the rough earthenware of the New Jersey Indians, as well as on the finer products of the Mexican ceramists. Their utmost development, indeed, is preserved in the latter country in the ruins of the ancient city of Mitla, where over twenty such designs were counted on the façade of a single building (Ayme) (see pi. 43, fig. 8).
Elements of Drawing graceful Greek story relates that drawing was first invented by a girl in outlining the shadow of her lover as it was cast upon a wall; and it is not impossible that the figure formed by the shadow supplied suggestions to the early learners for perfecting the proportions of their figures " in the flat." Certain it is, however, that their progress was very slow. Those indispensable elements of the higher pictorial art, perspective and chiar-oscnro, were unknown iu ancient Egypt, in Baby lon, or Assyria, and are to this day in China and Japan. We need not add that no nation of lower culture had achieved them. Although we have no nearer specimens of old Greek art in this line than some probably third-rate copies recovered from the buried city of Pompeii, yet they are sufficient to show that these principles were recognized by that gifted people. Forgotten in the Dark Ages, they were recovered at the revival of learning, and in modern times have been cultivated to a degree of mathematical accuracy.
Decorafions in Textile invention of textile material offered another fertile field to the passion for ornamentation. The coarse rush mats which the Indian women wove from the stalks and leaves of the sweet-flag and from the split bamboos of the tropics bore generally traces of designs and colors. When such material came in use as cloth ing, its decoration was vastly richer. The mummy-cloth from Peruvian graves exhibits extraordinary variety and intricacy of patterns. To pro duce and vary them required a constant exercise of ingenuity, an atten tion to nice mechanical adjustments, and to harmonies of proportion and color which found their ultimate expression in such wonders of taste, inventive genius, and patient endeavor as the Jacquard loom, the Gobelin tapestries, and the modern designs for dress goods.
The Color connection with this branch of our subject a physiological question of much ethnologic interest must be mentioned is, the development of the color sense. Many writers have argued that the perception of the finer distinctions of color is quite a modern acquisition of civilized people, that the savage races are incapable of it, and that even in the early historic times, as at the period of the composi tion of the Homeric poems and the books of the Pentateuch, many shades now easily distinguished were confounded. Neither in the pages of those early records, it is argued, nor in the languages of savage nations, can there be found words indicative of a developed sense of color comparable to that which we now enjoy.
There is a certain degree of truth in this view. In none of the Cen tral American languages of the Maya stock, for example, are there original words for blue and green. They are designated by the same word, with modifying affixes. Therefore there must have been a period when the ancestors of these people, looking upward, did not distinguish in language between the colors of the green leaves of the forest and the blue of the sky beyond. But it does not necessarily follow that they did not have the perception of the difference. Language develops only as it is required. In many American languages there are no separate radicals for blue and yellow, so that there must have been a time when these perceptions were blended in language, however widely apart they seem to us. The Ne'z Pere& of the North-west, a rather unusually intelligent tribe, appear to distinguish but three colors in the rainbow, as they name only that num ber. The Aryan tongues bear traces of a similar absence of color nota tion at some remote period. The pairs gray and green, blue and black, are derived each from a single radical, so that our Aryan ancestors expressed no difference between them.