Personal adornment was the earliest motive that led primitive man to cultivate other arts than those which were necessary to his existence. Just as soon as he had killed such wild animals as were dangerous, or were wanted for food, he probably set about carving some kind of design on his weapons. After a while, when he found more time, he went straight away to fashioning ornaments for his own person. If you should go to the Museum of Natural History in New York city, where the rude implements of men who lived many thousands of years ago are to be found, you will see many such early ornaments. Some of these ornaments are of the very roughest and coarsest kind, and would not be considered either pretty or becoming to-day. Early man took a small stone, and with infinite trouble bored a hole through it with a flint; then he strung it on a shred of sinew, and wore it around his neck. He was probably very selfish about this simple ornament, and it is quite likely that many years passed before he made any such beads for his wife, or allowed her to wear them. Gradually, however, man's artistic tastes were awakened, and he first cut the sides of the soft stones, then polished them, though many thousands of years passed before he learned how to engrave on hard stones. Gem-engraving is so old, however, that it is difficult to give it a date. You will find very often in collections a hard stone, which has something engraved on it, belonging to a very ancient period; but the material was fashioned into some form or other by people who had lived many centuries before. Cameo-cutting came after gem-engraving, and those who are learned in such matters tell us that there were cameos made as early as 162 years before Christ. Now what is a cameo? It may be a portrait, or a group of figures, or any design, cut on a hard material, where the work executed in relief, or the part which stands out, is of a different color from the ground. In order, then, to make a cameo you must have some hard substance composed of different layers. Such stones are called banded stones. There are many minerals, such as the onyx, the carnelian, or sard, where there are two layers of the same substance one on top of the other, but of different colors. The upper crust may be pure white or a pale fawn-color, and the lower layer red, or olive, or black. Then the contrast is very handsome. In order to get the materials on which cameos were to be engraved, the Greeks and Romans travelled a great distance, even as far as India. It is believed that cameo-cutting was at its greatest state of perfection in the second century of the Christian era, when the Roman lapidaries, as workers in precious stones are called, carried on their work. [Illustration]