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]