ases, most of which are to be found in the last of
the classical vase-rooms upstairs. Once more, compare the little clay
'whorls' of the Mexican and Peruvian room with those which Dr.
Schliemann found so numerous at Hissarlik. The conviction becomes
irresistible that all these objects, in shape, in purpose, in
character of decoration, are the same, because the mind and the
materials of men, in their early stages of civilisation especially,
are the same everywhere. You might introduce old Greek bits of
clay-work, figures or vases, into a Peruvian collection, or might
foist Mexican objects among the clay treasures of Hissarlik, and the
wisest archaeologist would be deceived. The Greek fret pattern
especially seems to be one of the earliest that men learnt to draw.
The _svastika_, as it is called, the cross with lines at right angles
to each limb, is found everywhere--in India, Greece, Scotland,
Peru--as a natural bit of ornament. The allegorising fancy of the
Indians gave it a mystic meaning, and the learned have built I know
not what worlds of religious theories on this 'pre-Christian cross,'
which is probably a piece of hasty decorative work, with no original
mystic meaning at all.[239] Ornaments of this sort were transferred
from wood or bone to clay, almost as soon as people learned that early
art, the potter's, to which the Australians have not attained, though
it was familiar to the not distant people of New Caledonia. The style
of spirals and curves, again, once acquired (as it was by the New
Zealanders), became the favourite of some races, especially of the
Celtic. Any one who will study either the ornaments of Mycenae, or
those of any old Scotch or Irish collection, will readily recognise in
that art the development of a system of ornament like that of the
Maoris. Classical Greece, on the other hand, followed more in the
track of the ancient system of straight and slanted lines, and we do
not find in the later Greek art that love of interlacing coils and
spirals which is so remarkable among the Celts, and which is very
manifest in the ornaments of the Mycenaean hoards--that is, perhaps, of
the ancient Greek heroic age. The causes of these differences in the
development of ornament, the causes that made Celtic genius follow one
track, and pursue to its aesthetic limits one early _motif_, while
classical art went on a severer line, it is, perhaps, impossible at
present to ascertain. But it is plain enough that later