684 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



evidence that the reverse is true. Most of us would be amazed if not 

 shocked at a true and life-size portrait of the real Eve, " mother of all 

 living." We often hear, indeed, of giants' bones here and there dug 

 up, but intelligent examination invariably proves them to have be- 

 longed to the mammoth or other animal. 1 A singular blunder of the 

 kind shows the real value of such reputed discoveries. Years ago, a 

 skeleton was dug from the calcareous shale at Oeningen, which the 

 veteran savant Scheuchzer confidently christened " Homo diluvii tes- 

 tis " the man who saw the flood. Casts of it were made for various 

 museums, and, in full faith in the legitimacy of the name, one Deacon 

 Mtiller was moved to write some most pious and edifying lines about 

 it. Unfortunately, the first competent study of the skeleton proved it 

 to be that not of an ancient sinner, but of a large salamander, closely 

 resembling the Giant Salamander of Japan. Yet, to this day, every 

 casually unearthed petrifaction, found no matter where or in what re- 

 lations, is to many a memorial of the Xoachian Deluge. Thus, theo- 

 ries which science has long ago refuted and dismissed from further con- 

 sideration, are persistently held fast and reaffirmed. 



If we are to attain even an approximate notion of the grade of 

 culture reached by what we must provisionally regard as the autoch- 

 thonic, primitive man of Europe, we must infer it from the yet pre- 

 served works of his hands rather than from the lamentably few osse- 

 ous remains yet found with them. He had various articles of bone 

 and horn, clubs and slings, and knives and spear-heads, some of which 

 were long and slender, some short and round, chipped into shape out 

 of flint and jasper. He had no pottery as yet, and no wrought metals. 

 He split the longer bones of animals used as food, the better to get at 

 the marrow ; and this was not only eaten, but probably then, as by 

 many savage races at present, employed as an unguent also. The do- 

 mestication of animals was evidently not yet begun even the horse 

 being used neither for draught nor for carrying. That primitive race 

 contented itself with the wild products of the forest, the chase, and 

 the waters, as to food, and for dwellings used caves, generally in cliffs 

 difficult of access and easy of defense, like those on the river Lesse, 

 near Namur. 



We are to picture to ourselves, then, a people very like the Esqui- 

 maux in circumstances and activities. It lived in our own Europe, 

 but Europe covered to a considerable extent with glaciers, and keep- 

 ing up a hard and continuous resistance both to wild beasts and the 

 rigors of a climate at once very cold and very damp. The mammoth 

 and rhinoceros, as we have seen, were protected by thick, woolly hair, 

 and fed upon the twigs of the abundant conifers, as fragments yet found 

 in the interstices of the teeth and ribs show. We must not be misled 



1 Our own papers often tell us of bones or skeletons of men who must have been 

 eight or ten feet in height, but in each case a tape-line and a little knowledge of anat- 

 omy reduce them to ordinary proportions. Trans. 



