Another very simple form of ornamentation, reappearing everywhere all the world over on primitive bowls and vases, is the rope pattern, a line or string-course over the whole surface or near the mouth of the vessel.  Many of the indented patterns on early British pottery have been produced, as Sir Daniel Wilson has pointed out, by the close impress of twisted cord on the wet clay.  Sometimes these cords seem to have been originally left on the clay in the process of baking, and used as a mould; at other times they may have been employed afterwards as handles, as is still done in the case of some South African pots:  and, when the rope handle wore off, the pattern made by its indentation on the plastic material before sun-baking would still remain as pure ornament.  Probably the very common idea of string-course ornamentation just below the mouth or top of vases and bowls has its origin in this early and almost universal practice.

When other conscious and intentional ornamentation began to supersede these rude natural and undesigned patterns, they were at first mere rough attempts on the part of the early potter to imitate, with the simple means at his disposal, the characteristic marks of the ropes or wickerwork by which the older vessels were necessarily surrounded.  He had gradually learned, as Mr. Tylor well puts it, that clay alone or with some mixture of sand is capable of being used without any extraneous support for the manufacture of drinking and cooking vessels.  He therefore began to model rudely thin globular bowls with his own hands, dispensing with the aid of thongs or basketwork.  But he still naturally continued to imitate the original shapes—­the gourd, the calabash, the plaited net, the round basket; and his eye required the familiar decoration which naturally resulted from the use of some one or other among these primitive methods.  So he tried his hand at deliberate ornament in his own simple untutored fashion.

It was quite literally his hand, indeed, that he tried at first; for the earliest decoration upon paleolithic pottery is made by pressing the fingers into the clay so as to produce a couple of deep parallel furrows, which is the sole attempt at ornament on M. Joly’s Nabrigas specimen; while the urns and drinking-cups taken from our English long barrows are adorned with really pretty and effective patterns, produced by pressing the tip of the finger and the nail into the plastic material.  It is wonderful what capital and varied results you can get with no more recondite graver than the human finger-nail, sometimes turned front downward, sometimes back downward, and sometimes used to egg up the moist clay into small jagged and relieved designs.  Most of these patterns are more or less plaitlike in arrangement, evidently suggested to the mind of the potter by the primitive marks of the old basketwork.  But, as time went on, the early artist learned to press into his service new implements, pieces of wood, bone scrapers, and the