[Illustration:  FIG. 1.]

The floral pattern on the dressing-gown of the master of the house, as well as on the light woolen shawl that is thrown round the shoulders of his wife, and even the brightly colored glass knicknacks on the mantel-piece, manufactured in Silesia after the Indian patterns of the Reuleaux collection, again show the same motive; in the one case in the more geometrical linear arrangement, in the other in the more freely entwined spirals.

Now you will perhaps permit me to denominate these three groups of patterns that occur in our new home fabrics as modern patterns.  Whether we shall in the next season be able, in the widest sense of the word, to call these patterns modern naturally depends on the ruling fashion of the day, which of course cannot be calculated upon (Fig. 2).

[Illustration:  FIG. 2.]

I beg to be allowed to postpone the nearer definition of the forms that occur in the three groups, which, however, on a closer examination all present a good deal that they have in common.  Taking them in a general way, they all show a leaf-form inclosing an inflorescence in the form of an ear or thistle; or at other times a fruit or a fruit-form.  In the same way with the stucco ornaments and the wall-paper pattern.

The Cashmere pattern also essentially consists of a leaf with its apex laterally expanded; it closes an ear-shaped flower-stem, set with small florets, which in exceptional cases protrude beyond the outline of the leaf; the whole is treated rigorously as an absolute flat ornament, and hence its recognition is rendered somewhat more difficult.  The blank expansion of the leaf is not quite unrelieved by ornament, but is set off with small points, spots, and blossoms.  This will be thought less strange if we reflect on the Eastern representations of animals, in the portrayal of which the flat expanses produced by the muscle-layers are often treated from a purely decorative point of view, which strikes us as an exaggeration of convention.

[Illustration:  FIG. 3.]

One cannot go wrong in taking for granted that plant-forms were the archetypes of all these patterns.  Now we know that it holds good, as a general principle in the history of civilization, that the tiller of the ground supplants the shepherd, as the shepherd supplants the hunter; and the like holds also in the history of the branch of art we are discussing—­representations of animals are the first to make their appearance, and they are at this period remarkable for a wonderful sharpness of characterization.  At a later stage man first begins to exhibit a preference for plant-forms as subjects for representation, and above all for such as can in any way be useful or hurtful to him.  We, however, meet such plant-forms used in ornament in the oldest extant monuments of art in Egypt, side by side with representations of animals; but the previous history of this very developed culture is unknown.