The figures cut on them are in all the specimens in my possession of the following patterns.—(Fig. 37.) Other missiles are marked thus.—(Fig. 38.) All these forms have a meaning intelligible to the blacks of that part of the continent.
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| FIG. 37. | FIG. 38. |
One sees in the simple forms used by the natives of Australia the rudiments of the arts which gave splendour to the palaces of ancient Chaldæa. In the richest monuments of the luxurious races that dwelt on the lands watered by the Euphrates and the Tigris the same lines and combinations of lines as those here figured are used and repeated. On some of the columns there are patterns which are line for line the same as those seen on the shields made by the natives of the Yarra. From a race that used the like style of ornamentation the Saxon derived the zigzag moulding of his arch—and Gothic architecture, perhaps, the hint of the quatre-foil. The lines that ornament the fowling-piece and the pistol of modern manufacture in Europe are but repetitions of the designs which are seen on the Australian Mulga and the Leon-ile.
The artist will view with interest these first attempts at ornamentation. That such forms have been in use in all ages, and are still universally adopted, show that artistic invention has its limits, and is as surely subject to law as are the physical forces which we may investigate, and in some sense control, but cannot change.
A common instinct prevails whenever the mind is left to its own resources, and is unaided by experience and untaught by example. A very young child in Europe and a full-grown native of Australia will make a diagram and not a picture in any attempt to represent the figure of a man or an animal or a plant. The coarser pictures of the Chinese and the Japanese are but highly-colored diagrams.
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| FIG. 39. |
The rude drawings of men made by European children are all alike. For the head there is a circle, with dots where the eyes, nose, and mouth should appear; the body is shown by another circle or an oval; and the arms and fingers and legs are represented by lines.
The Australian native shows the human figure somewhat differently. He sketches it usually thus.—(Fig. 39.) Throughout the continent this form is understood. In like manner the natives have conventional forms for trees, lakes, and streams; and in transmitting information to friends in remote tribes they use the conventional forms, but in many cases modified, and in some cases so simplified as to be in reality rather symbols than diagrams or pictures.
