he tells us that he succeeded without particular effort in discovering similar objects in certain simple ornamentations. We here have a case of the psychical process of assimilation. This is characteristic of all consciousness, but, as might be supposed, from the fact that primitive peoples live continuously in the open, it is more strongly in evidence among them than among civilized races. But the question now arises, Which came first? Did the Bakairi really wish to represent snakes, bees, women's aprons, etc., and reduce these to geometrical schematizations? Or did he, without such intention, first make simple linear decorations, and later read into them, through imaginative association, the memory images of objects? The latter is doubtless the case. For it is much easier first to draw simple lines and then to read complicated objects into them than it is, conversely, to reduce these pictures at the outset to abstract geometrical schemata. Indeed, when the Bakairi wishes to draw real objects, he proceeds just as our children do: he copies them as well as he can. For example, the Bakairi occasionally draws fishes in the sand for the purpose of marking out a path, or he attempts to reproduce men and animals in a way strikingly similar to our children's drawings. Evidently, therefore, it was not inability to draw the objects themselves that gave rise to these primitive geometrical decorations. The decorations came first, and the memory images of the objects of daily perception were then read into them. The answer, however, to the question as to why primitive man produces decorations at all, is easily found by calling to mind the motives discernible in such uniform and simple series of figures as the triangles and arcs which the Senoi and the Semangs cut into bamboo. Because of the character of his locomotor organs, primitive man repeats the movements of the dance at regular intervals, and this rhythm gives him pleasure. Similarly, he derives pleasure even from the regularly repeated movements involved in making the straight lines of his drawings, and this pleasure is enhanced when he sees the symmetrical figures that arise under his hand as a result of his movements. The earliest æsthetic stimuli are symmetry and rhythm. We learn this even from the most primitive of all arts, the dance. Just as one's own movements in the dance are an æsthetic expression of symmetry and rhythm, so also are these same characteristics embodied in the earliest productions of pictorial art--in the beginning indeed, they alone are to be found. The primitive song comes to be a song only as a result of the regular repetition of a refrain that in itself is unimportant. As soon as primitive man produces lines on wood, his pleasure in rhythmic repetition at once leads him to make these symmetrical. It is for this reason that we never find decorations that consist merely of a single figure--a single triangle, for instance--but always find a considerable number