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 possesses all the social conditions that
produce this art is a fact worth noticing, and itself proves that the
native art of one of the most backward races we know is not essentially
imitative.

[Fig. 1. An Australian Shield: 278