Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/675

Rh developed taste. The huts of savages are generally square, circular, or oval in shape, neatly wattled at symmetrical distances. The earliest architecture consists of regular stone rings, avenues, tumuli, and other definitely shaped monuments. Dr. Schweinfurth's "Heart of Africa" contains pictures of pottery as beautiful as anything ever produced in Greece or Etruria, stools, chairs, and other furniture as gracefully shaped as anything ever wrought by a Renaissance carver, and villages as prettily arranged after their simple fashion as the architects of the Parthenon or Cologne could have arranged them. If we look back in time, we find the stone hatchets and arrow-heads, not only of the neolithic but even of the palæolithic age, carefully symmetrical in shape, and that at a time when the extra labor of chipping the flints into comeliness must have entailed a considerable waste of human or half-human energy. At the same early date we find fossil shells, symmetrical bones, teeth, and other like objects, already drilled to serve as necklaces or other ornaments, which analogy with the similar ornaments now in use would lead us to believe were symmetrically strung together into definite patterns. Indeed, the more we look at the products of the very lowest savages and the very earliest men, the more shall we be convinced that they possessed in the germ all those aesthetic feelings which have finally developed our existing architecture and other decorative or semi-decorative arts.

Again, we can not fail to be struck by the fact that man has always employed for ornamental purposes exactly those very appendages of animals which, if the theory of sexual selection be correct, have been produced by the animals themselves as ornamental adjuncts. The feathers of peacocks, the plumes of the ostrich and the bird-of-paradise, the antlers of deers, the horns of antelopes, the tusks of elephants, mammoths, and musk-deer, the striped, spotted, or dappled skins of mammals, all these have been used from the earliest periods as materials for decoration by mankind. Exactly the same curls, twists, and patterns which seem to please the eyes of animals are known to please the eyes of man, even in his lowest developments. If these ornaments were not produced because the creatures themselves found them beautiful, at least they are the same as those which would have been produced had the taste of such creatures coincided in the main with that which runs throughout the whole of humanity, from the most degraded savage to the highest artist.

Moreover, part at least of the pleasure of form probably has a purely sensuous origin. The superiority of curved lines to straight, of the waving or sinuous contour to the angular, is apparently connected with the muscular process in the act of vision. Hence there is no reason why it might not be felt by intelligent animals, just as we know that it is felt, and acutely felt, by hardly more intelligent men.

Similar conclusions are forced upon us if we look at the nature of the supposed ornaments themselves. They are almost always, like the