The telling of rosary beads, widespread today in Moslem as in Catholic lands, is a milder modern aid to prayer; in primitive times the need for protection was no less frequent and more desperate. Those of us who carry a rabbit’s foot or other charm, who put an amulet in our automobile to help us drive safely, who still “knock wood” to keep away mischance, need not smile at our far-off ancestors who engraved their beads with potent symbols or wore a scarab, preferably carved of precious stone, to keep all ills away. Charms and amulets were on every neck and arm. The devils were all about; they whirled in the tempest; they sprang suddenly in the form of a wild beast; they twisted one’s ankle as a jungle vine. And every stone-age child knew that the agate protected one against thunder and against tiger bite. If the agate was ringed like an eye, especially a tiger’s eye, it could outstare and drive away the fiercest fiend. To turn away the fangs of the venomous hidden snake, what better charm than lapis lazuli? Thus each of the colored stones known to the ancients had its special powers, or could be carved with symbols and signs of might—and jewels were worn to ward off all misfortune. Even among the ancient Greeks, it was recognized that (as the slave in Aristophanes’ play _Plutus_ observes) there is no amulet that can save one from “the bite of a sycophant.” The third theory of the origin of adornment, the aesthetic, declares that man is born with a love of beauty. There is no question—and if there were, modern research has answered it—that the bright trinket attracts the babe. When one is happy one wants to sing; when one sees beauty, one wants to experience it with the gift of sight or, if it is tangible, to put it on. And ever to increase earth’s store of beauty. We cannot snare a sunrise, but we can make a garland of spring flowers. Even before he fashioned beads, primitive man adorned himself with necklaces of shells, of bears’ claws, stags’ teeth—probably also of many colored berries, but these have crumbled in the caves. Such findings are so widespread that Carlyle declared: “The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration.”