ABSTRACT
Various of the features of artificial evolution which have been already remarked on are once more in evidence in the examples of decoration which were collected together by Balfour in his Evolution of Decorative Art,1
by Alfred Haddon in his Evolution in Art,2 and by several other authors. These examples demonstrated, they argued, the apparent extreme conservatism of the primitive designer and his unwillingness to make severe alterations to traditional forms, so that novelty was again introduced only in stages. The origins or at least precursors of particular decorative forms were to be discovered by tracing them back through continuous series of always slightly differing copies. And such chains of ‘genetically’ connected designs might begin and end with examples so widely different that, unless the intermediate links were known, it would not be imagined that they were in any way related.
