preserve the
original motive of the sacred tree of life. The cone form in classical
art was drawn from the pine cone and the artichoke; and in mediaeval
art these were sometimes replaced by the pomegranate, and in the late
Renaissance by the pine-apple, newly arrived from the West
Indies.[113] It is a good example of the blending of one vegetable
form into another, making the sequence, of which each phase in the
East had an historical cause or a symbolical meaning,[114] but which
in Europe had gradually lost all motive, and was simply an
acknowledged decorative form.[115] In architectural ornament it is
called the honeysuckle,[116] which it had grown to resemble in the
days of Greece.

[Illustration: Pl. 23.
Different forms of Tree of Life, from Sicilian Silks.]

[Illustration: Pl. 24.
Modern Embroidery from the Principalities, in which the cone-shaped
tree grows into a vine, and the two animals at the foot have
lost their shape and intention.]

This sacred tree, the Homa of Zoroaster and of the later Persians, has
so early a beginning that we find it on Assyrian monuments.[117] Rock
says "that, perhaps, it stood for the tree of life, which grew in
Paradise." It is represented as a subject of homage to men and
animals, and it invariably stands between priests and kings, or beasts
kneeling to it. It is figured on the small bucket for religious rites,
carried in the hands, or embroidered in the upper sleeve of the
monarch's tunic. It always represents a shrub, sometimes bearing a
series of umbels of seven flowers each. (Pl. 2, 20.)

Sometimes the expression of the symbol is reduced to the cone-fruit of
the homa alone; or even to a blossom, as in the two glass bowls in the
Slade collection in the British Museum, from a tomb at Chiusi, in
Etruria. Here the design is a flower, of which each petal contains the
essential emblem--a plant within a plant. These bowls, pronounced to
be Greek of the fourth century B.C., have yet to me a strong Oriental
character. (Pl. 22, No. 3.)

I have spoken of the lotus as a naturalistic pattern. One mode of
drawing and embroidering its flower in India, is to cut it in two;
half the blossom is then carefully and almost botanically copied, thus
conveying the inner meaning of the sacred flower. (Pl. 22, No. 3.)

Another conventional pattern, common to all times of art and all
nations, is that called in architecture the "egg and tongue" pattern.
(Pl. 13.) This