The potter’s art is at all times an interesting study to the archæologist. We owe to Etruscan and Hellenic fictile ware our sole knowledge of painting, contemporary with the most gifted masters of the sculptor’s art. But it is in the form, rather than the decoration, that the chief excellency of the art of the potter consists. It is one of the plastic arts. The clay in the hands of the skilled modeller is even more facile than the pencil of the draughtsman; and the distinction between the purely decorative sports of an exuberant fancy, and the purposed symbolism of the carver or painter, is nowhere more strikingly manifest than in the modellings of the ingenious worker in clay. But fictile art belongs, for the most part, to periods greatly more recent than that of the ancient Stone age. Not that the work of the primitive potter involved such laboriously accumulated skill as lay beyond reach of the palæolithic carver and draughtsman; for clay cylinders from the banks of the Euphrates, and the terra-cottas from the Nile valley, carry us back to times that long antedate definite history. But alike among the ancient cave-dwellers of Aquitaine, and the modern Eskimo, the prevailing conditions of an Arctic or semi-Arctic climate rendered clay, fuel, and other needful appliances so rarely available, that among the latter, their pots and lamps are fashioned for the most part of the _Lapis ollaris_, or potstone. But traces of the pottery of many periods and races abound, and furnish interesting materials for comparison. The aptitude of the potter’s clay for a display of skill, alike in modelling and in tracing on the surface imitative designs and ornamental patterns, renders the fictile ware of widely different eras a ready test of æsthetic feeling, as well as a trustworthy guide to the age and race of its artificers. To the ancient cave-men, to whose skill such carvings as the reindeer from Laugerie Basse, or Montastrue, are due, modelling in clay would have been as easy and natural as to the modern sculptor; and pottery, if well-burnt, when not exposed to violence, is little less durable than flint or stone. The rarity, or total absence, of pottery among the contents of the palæolithic caves accords with other indications of a rigorous climate. A piece of plain earthenware was, indeed, recovered from the Belgian cave of Trou de Frontal; and Sir W. Dawson, in his _Fossil Men_, calls attention to the discovery, recorded by Fournal and Christie, of fragments of pottery in the mud and breccia of caverns in the south of France, along with bones of man and animals, including those of the hyæna and rhinoceros. Those, however, whatever be their true epoch, are mere potsherds, valuable in so far as they indicate the practice of the potter’s art at such a time, but furnishing no illustration of skill in modelling.