with excessively rude representations of his gods.  Objects of this kind—­rude hewn blocks of stone and wood—­were the most sacred effigies of the gods in Greece, and were kept in the dimmest recesses of the temple.  No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with the head of a mare.  The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked Admiralty Islanders.  But this is anticipating; in the meantime it may be said that among the sources of savage representative art are the need of something like writing, and ideas suggested by nascent religion.

[Fig. 9.  Bushman Wall-Painting:  295.jpg]

The singular wall-picture (Fig. 9) from a cave in South Africa, which we copy from the ‘Cape Monthly Magazine,’ probably represents a magical ceremony.  Bushmen are tempting a great water animal—­a rhinoceros, or something of that sort—­to run across the land, for the purpose of producing rain.  The connection of ideas is scarcely apparent to civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the connection between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has been hanged and success at cards—­a common French superstition.  The Bushman cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black, red, and white.  Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and like children, draw animals much better than the human figure.  The Bushman dog in our little engraving (Fig. 7) is all alive—­almost as full of life as the dog which accompanies the centaur Chiron, in that beautiful vase in the British Museum which represents the fostering of Achilles.  The Bushman wall-paintings, like those of Australia, seem to prove that savage art is capable of considerable freedom, when supplied with fitting materials.  Men seem to draw better when they have pigments and a flat surface of rock to work upon, than when they are scratching on hard wood with a sharp edge of a broken shell.  Though the thing has little to do with art, it may be worth mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the labyrinthine Australian caves are decorated, here and there, with the mark of a red hand.  The same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red hand is impressed on the walls of the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan—­the work of a vanished people.

[Fig. 10.  Palaelithic art:  297.jpg]

There is one singular fact in the history of savage art which reminds us that savages, like civilised men, have various degrees of culture and various artistic capacities.  The oldest inhabitants of Europe who have left any traces of their lives and handiwork must have been savages.  Their tools and weapons were not even formed of polished stone, but of rough-hewn flint.  The people who used tools of this sort must necessarily have enjoyed but a scanty mechanical equipment, and the life they lived in caves from which