ontinuity
in the path of progress.

[Illustration: Fig. 1.--An Australian Shield.]

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 po