Familiar modern examples of this reduction of an animal figure to one or two lines, with mysterious-looking branches (representing limbs or horns), are seen in the scattered devices on the Turkey carpets so largely used at the present day. A comparison of various examples of such carpets of different age and locality reveals the true nature of these queer-looking patterns as representations of animals! Another familiar instance of the grammatizing of an animal form is that shown in Fig. 52, D, which is the common symbol in modern European art for a flying bird. Fig. 52 shows, however, some more important simplifications of animal form. The series marked E are a few examples from hundreds painted on the walls of caves in Cantabria (Spain) by prehistoric men. They start with a clearly recognizable figure of a man–many such, an inch or two high, occur on some parts of the cave-walls–and then we have all sorts of simplifications and deviations from the more naturalistic initial design, as shown by the rest of the series, ending in a T–a primitive symbol often arrived at by savage decorative artists in various parts of the world by reducing and grammatizing the human figure. The letters of many alphabets have been simplified in this way from original picture-like signs or pictographs. [Illustration: FIG. 52.–Simplification (grammatizing) of decorative design. _A_, a stork walking. _B_, a stag. _C_, a stork with wings spread for flying–resulting when fully "grammatized" in a curvilinear swastika. _A_, _B_, and _C_, from spindle-whorls found at Hissarlik. _D_, conventional representation of three flying birds. _E_, grammatized human figure from the walls of caverns in Cantabria.] [Illustration: FIG. 53.–Spindle-whorl from Troy (fourth city), with three swastikas–two resembling "stylized" storks (see Fig. 52, C). (Schliemann.)]