When the spirals are not arranged and connected together in accordance with the requirements of geometry, some of the bands which compose the ornament have loose ends, _i.e._ run to nowhere. The question was how to dispose of the loose ends so as to deceive the eye and give the appearance of a continuous pattern. It was effected very simply by carrying the loose ends right round one or more of the other spirals so as to enclose them. Good instances of this occur on the sculptured slabs at Newgrange (p. 48), and on the carved stone ball from Towie, Aberdeenshire, now in the Edinburgh Museum of Antiquities. Mr. G. Coffey’s theory, in which we feel inclined to agree, is that the spiral motive came to Ireland from Scandinavia across Scotland and the north of England. Both the geographical distribution of spirals sculptured on stone in Great Britain, and the fact that the same imperfect method of connecting the spirals together for all over surface treatment is found in Ireland, Scotland, and Scandinavia certainly lend support to this view. It is now generally admitted by archæologists that the spiral decoration of the Bronze Age in Scandinavia is of Mycenæan origin; and the clearest possible proof is furnished by an associated spiral and lotus motive design upon a bronze celt from Aarhöj,[74] near Aalborg, Jutland, which finds an exact parallel in the ornament upon a gold pectoral from Mycenæ.[75] [74] _Mémoires de la Société Royale des Antiquaires du Nord_, 1887, p. 259. [75] Perrot and Chipiez’s _Art in Primitive Greece_, vol. i., p. 323. The Mycenæan spiral decoration has furthermore been clearly proved by Mr. Goodyear in his _Grammar of the Lotus_ to have been borrowed from ancient Egypt; the best instance of the transference of a spiral and lotus motive pattern from Egypt to the Ægean being the sculptured ceiling of the beehive tomb at Orchomenos. In Egypt, the spiral is found by itself forming a continuous running border on the scarabs of Usertesen I.[76] (Twelfth Dynasty, B.C. 2758-2714), and combined with the lotus on a scarab at Turin[77] of the same period. The best examples of the use of the spiral as continuous surface ornament are to be seen on the ceilings of Egyptian tombs of the Eighteenth Dynasty (B.C. 1633-1500).[78] The spiral motive thus was most nourishing in Egypt from the Twelfth Dynasty to the Eighteenth, say from B.C. 2758-1700.[79] After that it found its way to the Ægean, perhaps as early as 1400 B.C.,[80] and thence to Hungary, Scandinavia, and Great Britain. [76] Flinders Petrie, _Egyptian Decorative Art_, p. 21. [77] _Ibid._, p. 22. [78] _Prisse d’Avennes, Histoire de l’Art Egyptien après les Monuments._ [79] Flinders Petrie, _Decorative Art in Egypt_, p. 28. [80] _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. xii., p. 203.