_To please fancy._--The skill acquired by the handling of clay in constructing vessels and in efforts to increase their usefulness would open an expansive field for the play of fancy. The potter would no sooner succeed in copying vessels having life form than he would be placed in a position to realize his capacity to imitate forms not peculiar to vessels. His ambition would in time lead him even beyond the limits of nature and he would invade the realm of imagination, embodying the conceptions of superstition in the plastic clay. This tendency would be encouraged and perpetuated by the relegation of vessels of particular forms to particular ceremonies. +ORIGIN OF ORNAMENT.+ The birth of the embellishing art must be sought in that stage of animal development when instinct began to discover that certain attributes or adornments increased attractiveness. When art in its human sense came into existence ideas of embellishment soon extended from the _person_, with, which they had been associated, to all things with which man had to deal. The processes of the growth of the aesthetic idea are long and obscure and cannot be taken up in this place. The various elements of embellishment in which the ceramic art is interested may be assigned to two great classes, based upon the character of the conceptions associated with them. These are _ideographic_ and _non-ideographic_. In the present paper I shall treat chiefly of the non ideographic, reserving the ideographic for a second paper. Elements, non-ideographic from the start, are derived mainly from two sources: 1st, from objects, natural or artificial, associated with the arts; and, 2d, from the suggestions of accidents attending construction. Natural objects abound in features highly suggestive of embellishment and these are constantly employed in art. Artificial objects have two classes of features capable of giving rise to ornament: these are _constructional_ and _functional_. In a late stage of development all things in nature and in art, however complex or foreign to the art in its practice, are subject to decorative treatment. This latter is the realistic pictorial stage, one of which the student of native American culture needs to take little cognizance. Elements of design are not invented outright: man modifies, combines, and recombines elements or ideas already in existence, but does not create. A classification of the sources of decorative motives employed in the ceramic art is given in the following diagram: