“I don’t know,” says Alice, “I lost count.” “She can’t do addition,” says the White Queen. Well--she “lost count,” and, therefore, that series of ones failed to have any fresh meaning or association for her. In the same way the primitive savage loses count; beyond three, numbers are too many for him--they become merely a “lot.” But war and the chase begin to teach him the relative value of numbers; and he finds out that if one lot goes out to fight a bigger lot, the smaller lot probably gets beaten; so that, before long, calculation of some sort becomes necessary for the preservation of existence. He finds out also (and this is where ornament begins to come in) that a certain amount of wilful miscalculation has a beauty and a value of its own. So, after going out to fight ten against ten, and defeating them, he comes back and says to his wives and the surrounding communities by whom he wishes to be held in awe--“My lot killed bigger lot--much, much bigger lot.” And so, when he comes later on to set down his wilful miscalculations in records of scripture, he provides delightful problems for the Bishop Colensos of future ages--problems the undoing of which may shake to the foundations the authority of documents which some mid-Victorian school of Christianity has hitherto held to be divinely and verbally inspired--not realising that the normal tendency of human nature is to be decorative when writing its national history or when giving its reasons for having plunged into war. You begin now, then, to perceive (if you did not before), the importance of ornamental association, even when confined to matters of arithmetic; and the moral value to future ages not merely of calculated truths but of calculated untruths. But this merely figurative illustration of the quickness of the human brain, in its primitive stage, to use mathematics to unmathematical ends (or science to ends quite unscientific) does not bring us very far upon the road to that self-realisation, in ornament rather than in use, which I hope to make manifest by tracing to their most characteristic forms of expression the higher grades of civilization. And I shall hope, by and by, to show that you cannot be social without also being ornamental; it is the beginning of that connecting link which shall presently make men realise that life is one, and that all life is good.