ervice, but, in order to perfect its usefulness,
its lines became more perfect and its surface more highly polished. So
we might say for the spear-head, the knife, or the olla. Artistic
lines and decorative beauty always followed the purpose of use. This
could be applied to all of the products of man's invention to transform
parts of nature to his use. On account of the durability of form, the
attempt to trace the course of civilization by means of the development
of the fine arts has met with much success. Though the idea of beauty
is not essential to the preservation of man or to the making of the
state, it has exerted a great influence in individual-building and in
society-building. In our higher emotional natures aesthetic ideas have
ruled with imperial sway.

But primitive ideas of beauty appear to us very crude, and even
repulsive. The adornment of person with bright though rudely colored
garments, the free use of paint on the person, and the promiscuous use
of jewelry, as {38} practised by the primitive peoples, present a great
contrast to modern usage. Yet it is easy to trace the changes in
custom and, moreover, to determine the origin of present customs. So
also in representative art, the rude sketch of an elephant or a buffalo
on ivory or stone and the finished picture by a Raphael are widely
separated in genius and execution, but there is a logical connection
between the two found in the slowly evolving human activities. The
rude figure of a god moulded roughly from clay and the lifelike model
by an Angelo have the same relations to man in his different states.
The same comparison may be made between the low, monotonous moaning of
the savage and the rapturous music of a Patti, or between the beating
of the tom-tom and the lofty strains of a Mozart.

_Progress Is Estimated by Economic Stages_.--The progress of man is
more clearly represented by the successive economic stages of his life.
Thus we have first the _primal nomadic_ period, in which man was a
wanderer, subsisting on roots and berries, and with no definite social
organization. This period, like all primary periods, is largely
hypothetical. Having learned to capture game and fish, he entered what
might be called the _fisher-hunter_ stage, although he was still a
nomad, and rapidly spread over a large part of the earth's surface,
wandering from forest to forest and from stream to stream, searching
for the means of subsistence and clothing.