828 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The large majority of these drawings are no better executed 

 than those which school children make on walls. The figures of 

 the reindeer, however, are superior, by the remarkable care with 

 which the characteristic lines of the animal are traced, and also, 

 in rare specimens, by the addition of shadows. The drawings of 

 the chamois, the bear, and the ox are likewise often strikingly 

 exact and of real value. 



Besides these drawings of mammals, several representations of 

 fishes, exact but very uniform, have been found in caverns in 

 France. As a whole, as Broca remarks, all these relics of primi- 

 tive art demonstrate that the men of this prehistoric period care- 

 fully observed the forms and attitudes of animals, and were capa- 

 ble of representing them exactly and elegantly, attesting a real 

 artistic sense. 



No such skill has been observed with reference to the repre- 

 sentation of the human figure ; and designs in which it appears are 

 extremely rare. Of two of them, one represents a man naked, 

 armed with a club, and surrounded by animals ; and the second, a 

 fishing scene, in which a man is lancing a harpoon at some marine 

 animal a fish, according to Broca ; a whale, according to others. 

 In this piece we are most interested in the man. The drawing, 

 as a whole, is puerile and deformed, and the proportions are sur- 

 prisingly violated. The specimen is not an exception, for the 

 examination of all the drawings of this kind proves that the men 

 of those times, while very skillful in the representation of ani- 

 mals, especially of those which were important to them, were very 

 poor delineators of the human figure. 



Another not less characteristic point is the complete absence of 

 drawings of plants. No representation of a tree, or bush, or even 

 of a flower is found, unless we regard as of that character the 

 three little rosettes engraved on a handle of reindeer horn, which 

 some authors think is the figure of a composite flower. Such un- 

 doubted exclusiveness on the part of the inhabitants of the caves 

 was evidently not accidental, for chance explains nothing ; and we 

 can not admit, with Carl Vogt, that primitive drawing originated 

 in a general tendency of man to the imitation of living Nature. 

 We think the object of these artistic productions was of a quite 

 different character, and that they were originally designed, not for 

 ornament or for pure and simple imitation of Nature, but to secure 

 an instrument for use in the struggle with Nature. 



We remark, first, that there is nothing to prove that the men 

 of that epoch were mentally superior to modern savages ; and, if 

 we observe these, we shall ascertain that their drawings have 

 usually a very different significance from what they have among 

 civilized peoples, and nothing in common with decoration and 

 aesthetics in general. Numerous facts prove that human thought 



