Some three years ago Sir Arthur Evans discovered in the palace of the ancient Kings of Crete coloured frescoes some 3,500 years old representing in great detail elegant young women with greatly compressed waists, strongly-pronounced bustles, and elaborately ornamented skirts. These Cretan paintings of prehistoric young women, both in costume and pose, are like nothing so much as the portraits of distinguished ladies of the fashionable world of Paris exhibited by the painter, Boldini, in the "Salon." It is remarkable that explorers should have found contemporary paintings of young ladies who lived nearly as long before Cleopatra as she lived before us. And it is still more remarkable that those young ladies were "got up" in the same style, and apparently aimed at much the same effects of line and movement, as those which have become the latest fashion in Paris, and may be described as sinuous and serpentine. Not only is that the case, but it is evident that the painter of Knossos, the Minotaur city, and M. Boldini have experienced the same artistic impression, and have presented in their pictures the same significance of pose and the same form, from the tip of the nose to the ends of the fingers and the points of the toes--thus revealing a sympathy reaching across many ages. It seems to me that the same artistic impression is to be detected in the still earlier paintings of the wasp-waisted little ladies of the Cogul rock-shelter in Catalonia. We find here the same sinuous figure with exaggeratedly compressed waist, prominent bosom, and emphasised haunches. But it is many, perhaps forty, thousands years earlier! One is led to wonder whether this type of human female--to-day expressed with such masterly skill by Boldini--may not be at the back of the mind of a portion of the human race--that which populated what are now the shores of the Mediterranean, and probably came there travelling northwards from the centre of Africa. Possibly they brought with them that tendency to, and admiration for, megalopygy which is evidenced by the makers of the earliest known palaeolithic cave sculptures (the Aurignacians), and has persisted in some degree ever since in Europe--a tendency and a taste which are on the one hand totally absent in the East and Far East (Japan), and on the other hand have a strong development in the modern Bushmen (and the related Hottentots), an African race, and like the Spanish cave-men, rock painters. [Illustration: Plate VIII.--Votary or priestess of the goddess to whom snakes were sacred. The original is a statuette in faience, ten inches high, and was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in the palace at Knossos in Crete. It dates from 1600 B.C.]