Certain it is that, so far as present evidence goes, the greatly prolonged Neolithic period was characterised by no such artistic feeling or imitative skill. Specimens of the ingenious handiwork of the artificers of Europe’s later Stone age abound. We have numerous relics from the kitchen middens of Denmark, the pile villages of Switzerland, the crannoges of Scotland and Ireland, as well as the varied contents of cromlechs, cists, cairns, and barrows, diligently explored throughout Europe. But no such examples of carvings, or graven representations of animals or other natural objects, have been found. The “clay in the hands of the potter” is a familiar symbol of plastic response to the will of the designer. It is, indeed, easier for the practised modeller to fashion the clay into any desired form, than to draw it, subject to rules of perspective, on a flat surface. Linear devices and the representation of objects in intaglio, or in low relief, are also accomplished with great facility on the soft clay. Hence the art of diverse races, periods, and stages of progress, finds its aptest illustration in fictile ware; and the imitative faculty of widely different American races may be studied in their pottery. In Mexico, apparently, we have to look for the northern school of ceramic art. There, the aggressive races of the North first came in contact with the civilisation of Central America; and the native aptitude for imitative representation received a fresh impulse. The Indian modeller learned to work skilfully in clay; and the variety of design, combined with the quaint humour of the caricaturist, displayed in many of the Mexican terra-cottas, serves to indicate this class of work as specially significant in relation to the present inquiry. The inventive fancy and skill of the Peruvian potter illustrates in ampler variety the progress achieved by the races of the southern continent. But this will more fitly come under review along with other examples of modern native art. For no analogous traces of contemporary modelling in clay furnish material for comparison with the art of the Palæolithic era; though the skill of its bone and ivory carvers was in no degree inferior to that of the Mexican or Peruvian modeller. But the æsthetic aptitude of that old race of Europe’s intellectual dawn is in some respects unique. In so far as their ingenious arts furnish any evidence of true racial characteristics, the men of the Neolithic era inherited none of their æsthetic feelings; nor did the imitative faculty manifest itself with exceptional power until the advent of the Aryan races brought with it the potentialities of Hellenic inspiration.