a, Octopus drawn on a goblet from Crete, the arms reduced to two, the eyes detached.
b and c, Bull's head variations of the octopus, from designs found at Koban in the Caucasus.
d, Spiral treatment of the arms of the octopus (a pose actually seen in living specimens).
e, f, Human faces painted on Cretan jars across the whole width of the neck, the design being derived from the octopus with detached eyes as in Fig. a. Such designs survive long after their origin is forgotten, as (according to M. Houssay) the legend of the barnacle and the goose survived two thousand years after the Mykenæan drawings assimilating one to the other had been forgotten.]
The solution is as follows: The Mykenæan population of the islands of Cyprus and Crete, in the period 800 to 1000 years before Christ, were great makers of pottery, and painted large earthernware basins and vases with a variety of decorative representations of marine life, of fishes, butterflies, birds, and trees. Some of these are to be seen in the British Museum at Bloomsbury, where I examined them a few years ago. Others have been figured by the well-known archæologists, MM. Perrot and Chipiez, in the sixth volume of their work, "L'Ossuaire de Crète." M. Perrot consulted M. Houssay, in his capacity of zoologist, in regard to these Mykenæan drawings, which bear, as M. Houssay states, the evidence of having been designed _after nature_ by one who knew the things in life, although they are not slavishly "copied" from nature. These early Mykenæan painters on pottery were members of a community who worshipped the great mother--"Nature"--as Astarte or Aphrodite risen from the foam of the sea. Being sailors and fishermen, marine life was even more familiar to them than that of the land, and they placed little models of sea animals as votive offerings in the temples of the great mother, and also honoured her in decorating their pottery with marine creatures. The little fish, Hippocampus, called the sea-horse, the sea-urchin, the octopus, the argonaut and its floating cradle, the sea-anemone, and the butterfly-like Pteropod, were subjects used by these artists for which they found terrestrial counterparts. The sea-horse was convertible decoratively into a true horse, with intermediate phases imagined by the artists; the sea-urchin into a hedgehog, the sea-anemone into a flower, and the Pteropod into a true butterfly. These artists loved to exercise a little fancy and ingenuity. By gradual reduction in the number and size of outstanding parts--a common rule in the artistic "schematizing" or "conventional simplification" of natural form--they converted the octopus and the argonaut, with their eight arms, into a bull's head with a pair of spiral horns (Fig. 14). In the same spirit it seems that they observed and drew the barnacle floating on timber or thrown up after a storm on their shores. They detected a resemblance in the marking of its shells to the plumage of a goose, whilst in the curvature of its stalk they saw a resemblance to the long neck of the bird. The barnacle's jointed plumose legs or cirri and other details suggested points of agreement with the feathers of the bird. They brought the barnacle and the goose together, not guided thereto by any pre-existing legend, but by a simple and not uncommon artistic desire to follow up a superficial suggestion of similarity and to conceive of intermediate connecting forms. Some of their fanciful drawings with this purpose are shown in Figs. 15, 16, and 17. These (excepting the drawing of the barnacle lying within its opened shell) are copied from M. Houssay's paper on the subject, and were taken from the work of M. Perrot on Cretan pottery.