wledge,
anthropological and linguistic, than is at present within the reach of
any student. Assuredly the races of the earth have wandered far, and
have been wonderfully intermixed, and have left the traces of their
passage here and there on sculptured stones, and in the keeping of the
ghosts that haunt ancient grave-steads. But when two pieces of
artistic work, one civilised, one savage, resemble each other, it is
always dangerous to suppose that the resemblance bears witness to
relationship or contact between the races, or to influences imported
by one from the other. New Zealand work may be Asiatic in origin, and
debased by the effect of centuries of lower civilisation and ruder
implements. Or Asiatic ornament may be a form of art improved out of
ruder forms, like those to which the New Zealanders have already
attained. One is sometimes almost tempted to regard the favourite
Maori spiral as an imitation of the form, not unlike that of a
bishop's crozier at the top, taken by the great native ferns. Examples
of resemblance, to be accounted for by the development of a crude
early idea, may be traced most easily in the early pottery of Greece.
No one says that the Greeks borrowed from the civilised people of
America. Only a few enthusiasts say that the civilised peoples of
America, especially the Peruvians, are Aryan by race. Yet the remains
of Peruvian palaces are often by no means dissimilar in style from the
'Pelasgic' and 'Cyclopean' buildings of gigantic stones which remain
on such ancient Hellenic sites as Argos and Mycenae. The probability is
that men living in similar social conditions, and using similar
implements, have unconsciously and unintentionally arrived at like
results.

[Illustration: Fig. 6.--From a Maori's Face.]

Few people who are interested in the question can afford to visit Peru
and Mycenae and study the architecture for themselves. But any one who
is interested in the strange identity of the human mind everywhere,
and in the necessary forms of early art, can go to the British Museum
and examine the American and early Greek pottery. Compare the Greek
key pattern and the wave pattern on Greek and Mexican vases, and
compare the bird faces, or human faces very like those of birds, with
the similar faces on the clay pots which Dr. Schliemann dug up at
Troy. The latter are engraved in his book on Troy. Compare the
so-called 'cuttle-fish' from a Peruvian jar with the same figure on
the early Greek v