Whether barbarous or civilised nations are classified in accordance with their linguistic affinities, both are found to manifest other specialties according with the diverse families of speech. The differences which separate the Aryan from the Semitic races are not more marked than the intellectual and moral divergencies among barbarous tribes. But while this is apparent on the American continent, its diverse races appear to be characterised by a more general aptitude for artistic imitation than is observable elsewhere, except among the long-civilised nations of the Old World, whose composite vocabularies reveal the sources of many borrowed arts. The Peruvian potter sketched and modelled endless quaint devices in clay; the Zuñian decorated his gracefully fashioned ware with highly effective parti-coloured designs; and the old Mound-Builder wrought in intaglio on his domestic and sepulchral vessels conventional flower patterns; and in his miniature sculptures reproduced the fauna of an area extending from the Ohio to the Gulf of Mexico. Native artificers of widely different American races manifest this imitative faculty. Not only is the Indian pipe sculptor found copying animate and inanimate objects with an observant eye and a ready hand, but even the linear patterns on pottery and straw basket-work are frequently made to assume combinations obviously suggested by flowers and other familiar objects of nature. The perception of such analogies, and even the capacity for appreciating the linear or pictorial representation of objects on a flat surface, varies greatly in different races. Travellers have repeatedly described the manifestation by savage races of an utter incapacity to comprehend pictured representations. Mr. Oldfield, for example, tells how a large coloured engraving of a native of New Holland was shown to some Australians. “One declared it to be a ship, another a kangaroo, and so on, not one of a dozen identifying the portrait as having any connection with himself.”[82] The artistic faculty is unquestionably hereditary. There are artistic families and artistic races. But if so, the pictorial skill of the palæolithic cave-dwellers of Western Europe was not transmitted to their successors. Guided not only by a comparison of their tools and weapons with those of the Neolithic period, but also by cranial and other physical evidence, we are led to assume the absence of affinity between the men of the Perigord caves and the greatly more modern races of Europe’s later Stone period; and their lack of the imitative faculty, so characteristic of the elder race, adds confirmation to this opinion.