There is an additional factor which obviously favours the development of the art of tattooing, particularly in the territory of the Polynesian Islands. I refer to the combination of totemism with celestial mythology, which is peculiar to these peoples, and to the consequent recedence of totemism. Particularly illuminative as regards this point is the tattooing of the Maoris. The mythology of this people gives an important place to the sun, and their bodily decorations frequently include pictures of this celestial body, in the form of spiral ornamentations. Some two years ago travelling investigators brought back copies of the tattooing of other islanders, particularly those of the Marquesas group. These tattoo-patterns contain many significant elements of a celestial mythology; those of to-day, however, in so far as the custom has not been entirely effaced by the Europeans, consist almost entirely of simple geometrical ornamentations. The tattooings of early times frequently included also representations of animals. Plants were less common, as might be expected from the fact that it was only later that they acquired importance for totemic cults. At the same time, it is evident that a sort of reversal took place as regards the pictorial representation of objects. This is even more striking in the tattooing of the American Indians, a tattooing restricted to certain parts of the body. In the preceding chapter the fact has already been noted that, among the primitive peoples of the pretotemic age, as, for example, the Semangs and Senoi of Malacca, the multiplication of simple parallel lines, triangles, arcs, etc., gives rise to plant-like and animal-like forms. Doubtless the primitive artist himself discovers such figures in his drawings and then sometimes consciously sets about to imitate more closely the actual forms of the natural objects. At the stage of development now under discussion, we find, conversely, that animal forms, particularly, are retranslated into geometrical objects in that they become, as we would to-day express it, more and more conventionalized. Since only the simplest outlines of the objects are retained, it may eventually become a matter of doubt whether these really are schematic representations of natural objects, and whether they are not, even from the very beginning, geometrical ornamentations. Nevertheless the fact that there are continuous transitions from the developed animal form to the geometrical ornament, as occurs particularly in America, is incontrovertible proof that such a conventionalization took place, though in many cases, doubtless, very slowly. This process of conventionalization, however, may be more clearly traced in connection with a different art, one that is related to tattooing but whose development is not limited, as is that of the latter, and destined from the very outset to become obsolete. I refer to _ceramics_, the art of decorating the vessels which were at first