THE TRIUMPH OF THE BEST. 91 



iuses are only the better disciples of nature, our great and 

 kind teacher. 



While we may fairly well assume that the ancestors 

 of the human race must have been fierce in battle and 

 presumably wilder than the savages of Australia and 

 Africa, we have good reason to believe that the first dawn 

 of humanization was not without many redeeming features 

 of humaner qualities. The age of primitive man must, 

 at any rate, have been an interesting era stirred by a pe- 

 culiar intellectual activity. What a miracle must have 

 been the first appearance or shall we say accidental in- 

 vention of firemaking, produced while boring holes with 

 a hard stick in soft wood. So many relics of artifacts, art 

 representations as well as utensils of most ancient date 

 have been discovered, that some anthropologists speak of 

 this period as a first efflorescence of the arts, and we may 

 fairly well assume that there were among this primitive 

 race of ape-men quite a number of geniuses, both invent- 

 ors and artists. A review of the fragments discovered in 

 many places shows that in hours of leisure their imagina- 

 tion prompted them to represent objects uppermost in 

 their minds. They drew pictures of the mammoth which 

 they hunted, of the reindeer, of the cave-bear, fish, bison, 

 and the horse. They sculptured ornamental staves, the 

 use of which has not yet been determined, though they 

 may have served the purpose of scepters. They made 

 needles of bones, fashioned horns of the reindeer into 

 hammers, and from flint produced arrow-heads and knives. 

 It is peculiar that no figure of man either carved or drawn 

 has been discovered, but there are several sculptured 

 women which are for plausible reasons supposed to belong 

 to the very oldest relics of human art. One of them, very 

 awkwardly carved and scarcely recognizable as a woman's 

 form, is called the Venus of Brassempouy. Another fe- 

 male torso belonging to the Collection de Vibraye at Paris, 

 and now in the National Museum there, was found in 



