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.