only contributed to identify an individual unmistakably but also presented a tangible essence of the individuality and lent a spiritual or magical force to the written word.

Finally, I should like, in this connection to call attention to a peculiar method of painting practiced by the artists of China, in which the brush is altogether discarded and only the tips of the fingers are employed in applying the ink to the paper. This specialty is widely known in China under the name chi hua, which literally means "finger painting," and still evokes the highest admiration on the part of the Chinese public, being judged as far superior to brush painting. The first artist to have cultivated this peculiar style, according to Chinese traditions, was Chang Tsao, in the eighth or ninth century, of whom it is said that "he used a bald brush, or would smear color on the silk with his hand." 1 Under the Manchu dynasty, Kao K'i-pei, who lived at the end of the seventeenth and in the first part of the eighteenth century, was the best representative of this art. "His finger paintings were so cleverly done that they could scarcely be distinguished from work done with the brush; they were highly appreciated by his contemporaries," says Hirth. On plates 4 and 5 two ink sketches by this artist in the collection of the Field Museum are reproduced. Both are expressly stated in the accompanying legends written by the painter's own hand to have been executed with his fingers. The one representing two hawks fluttering around a tree trunk is dated 1685; the other presents the reminiscence of an instantaneous observation, a sort of flashlight picture of a huge sea fish stretching its head out of the waves for a few seconds and spurting forth a stream of water from its jaws. The large monochrome drawing shown on plate 6-cranes in a lotus pond by Yo Yu-sun-is likewise attested as being a finger sketch (chi mo), and the painter seems to prove that he really has his art at his fingers' ends. Hirth is inclined to regard this technique "rather a special sport than a serious branch of the art," and practiced "as a specialty or for occasional amusement." There was a time when I felt tempted to accept this view, and to look upon finger painting as an eccentric whim of the virtuosos of a decadent art who for lack of inner resources endeavored to burn incense to their personal vanity. But if Chang Tsao really was the father of this art, at a time when painting was at the culminating point of artistic development, such an argument can not be upheld. I am now rather disposed to believe that the origin of finger painting seems to be somehow linked with the practice of finger prints, and may have received its impetus from the latter. The relationship of the two terms is somewhat significant; hua chi, "to paint the finger," as we saw above

1 H. A. Giles, An Introduction to the History of Chinese Pictorial Art, p. 61. F. Hirth, Scraps from a Collector's Note Book, p. 30.

in the passage quoted from Kia Kung-yen, is the phrase for "making a finger impression" in the T'ang period, and the same words reversed in their position, chi hua, mean "finger painting" or "painted with the finger." It seems to me that also in finger painting the idea of magic was prevalent at the outset, and that the artist, by the immediate bodily touch with the paper or silk, was enabled to instill part of his soul into his work. Eventually we might even go a step farther and make bold to say that finger painting, in general, is a most ancient and primitive method of drawing and painting, one practiced long before the invention in the third century B. C. of the writing brush of animal hair, and the older wooden stylus. The hand, with its versatile organs of fingers, was the earliest implement utilized by man, and the later artistic finger painting might well be explained as the inheritance of a primeval age revived under suggestions and impressions received from the finger-print system.

URBANISM: A HISTORIC, GEOGRAPHIC, AND ECONOMIC

STUDY.1

By PIERRE Clerget,

Professor at the High School of Commerce, Lyon, France.

I. ANCIENT CITIES.

"We should not have the idea of ancient cities," writes Fustel of Coulanges, "that we have of those we see built in our day. A few houses are erected and that is a village; the number of houses is gradually increased and it becomes a city; and we finish it, if there be room, by surrounding it with a moat and a wall. Among the ancients a city was not formed in course of time by a slow increase in the number of inhabitants and buildings, but they constructed it at once, complete almost in a day." The first need of the founder was to choose a site for the new city, but the choice was always left to the decision of the gods. Around the altar, which became the shrine of the city, were built the houses, "just as a dwelling is erected around the domestic fireside." The boundary, traced according to a religious rite, was inviolable. This ceremony of founding the city was not forgotten, and each year they celebrated its anniversary. Every ancient city was first of all a sanctuary.

Rome, in particular, was created in that way. One of the remarkable traits of her politics was that she attracted to herself all the cults of conquered peoples, and this was the chief way through which she succeeded in increasing her population. She brought to herself the inhabitants of conquered cities and little by little she made Romans of them, each of them being permitted to exercise his cult; this liberty was enough to retain them there.

At a time when statistics were unknown we are left, by lack of accurate figures, to rely for information upon some very uncertain and probably exaggerated estimates by ancient historians. Beloch, cited by M. de Foville, gives 800,000 inhabitants to Rome in the reign of Augustus; Young estimates Carthage under the Empire at 700,000; Schmoller gives 600,000 to 700,000 inhabitants to ancient

1 Translated, by permission, from Bulletin de la Société Neuchateloise de Géographie, vol. 20, 1909-10, pp. 213-231. Neuchatel, Switzerland, 1910.

Fustel de Coulanges: La cité antique, 17 édit, Paris, Hachette, 1900, p. 151.

Alexandria, 600,000 to Seleucia, and 100,000 to Antioch and Pergamis.

In Greece the origin of cities was due to the same religious motive, but "the topography of the country, the characteristics of the race, the social and political status, all united in turning that country toward trades and manufactures, commerce, navigation, colonization, and everywhere gave birth to cities which, like Miletis, Chalcis, Corinth, Ægina, and later, Athens, found in the new ways, riches and fame. It produced there, in brief, from the seventh to the fourth centuries before Christ, a phenomenon comparable to what we see to-day among modern peoples." In Greece it was chiefly through slavery that the cities increased in their way the number of inhabitants. It was Chios, a maritime city, that first introduced foreign slaves among them. Its example was imitated by cities which had like needs, and there was thus organized "a steady stream of immigration, which brought from all the Orient into Greece an abundance of workmen."2 The population of ancient cities also included a great number of foreigners (métèques) who, having abandoned their native land with no hope of return, consecrated themselves to the trades and to commerce. At Athens, toward the end of the fifth century before Christ, the métèques and the freedmen reached the number of 100,000, as opposed to 120,000 citizens. Prosperity was then directly proportionate to the abundance of handwork, for the arm was the only force employed; but from the day when work and money failed them the cities decreased in population. Such was Greece during the second and first centuries before Christ. "Thebes," writes Strabo, "was only a market town and the other cities of Boeotia showed the same decline."

Before the Mediterranean epoch, where the principal seats of civilization were represented simultaneously or in turn by the great oligarchies, Phenician, Carthaginian, Greek, and Italian-and we might repeat for Tyre and Carthage what we have said of Grecian cities were placed the four great civilizations of high antiquity which all flourished in navigable regions. "Hoangho and YangtzeKiang," writes L. Metchnikoff, "flowed through the primitive domain of Chinese civilization; Vedique, India, was likewise cut by the basins of the Indus and the Ganges; the Assyro-Babylonian monarchies spread over a vast country of which the Tigris and the Euphrates formed the two vital arteries; Egypt, finally, as Herodotus has said, was a gift, a present, a creation, of the Nile." From Nineveh, on the Tigris, Assyrian civilization was carried to Babylon

1 Paul Guiraud: Études économiques sur l'antiquité. Paris, Hachette, 1905, p. 127.

2 Paul Guiraud, op. cit.

Léon Metchnikoff, La civilisation et les grands fleuves historiques. Paris, Hachette, 1889.