832 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is noteworthy that all works of tliis kind appertaining to 

 the embryonal period of the arts of design display the want of 

 proportionality, the absence of symmetry characteristic of sil- 

 houettes of shadows. The uniform impression given by these 

 drawings is that they refer, not to the objects themselves, but to 

 their shadows. It is likewise interesting to remark that some 

 contemporaneous savages some Australians, for example are 

 still incapable of grasping the meaning of the most perfectly 

 faithful images, while they readily understand a rude, ill-propor- 

 tioned drawing. Thus, to give them the idea of a man, he must 

 be drawn with a greatly enlarged head a detail, the spirit of 

 which is paralleled upon a drawing found in a cavern in France, 

 and representing a fisherman. He has a very small body, but 

 his hand, armed with an enormous harpoon, is the hand of a giant. 



In his struggle with surrounding Nature a struggle of which 

 it is almost impossible for us to conceive an exact idea the first 

 need of primitive man was to possess some means of giving him 

 confidence in victory. In going to the hunt he took with him, as 

 the North American Indian does, and as do under another form 

 some of the gamblers in our most civilized circles, the fetich that 

 was to assure his success that is, the image of the animal he 

 wanted to kill. In engraving on the handle of his dagger the 

 likeness of a reindeer or other animal, he was not thinking of 

 decorating his weapon, but only of bringing some magic power to 

 bear upon his prey ; and it was precisely faith in that mysteri- 

 ous force, by giving him boldness, energy, and security of move- 

 ment, that would procure him success. Confidence acts thus in 

 everything. 



Like the rcodern savage, the man of the caves believed that 

 the greater the resemblance between the animal and its likeness, 

 the greater was the chance of acting on the animal. Hence the 

 care taken in the pictured reproduction of animals particularly 

 sought for, and against which his struggle was the most earnest ; 

 hence those perfect drawings of the reindeer, that magnificent 

 game of our ancestors. Very diJfferent are the characteristics 

 of the drawings of human forms. To account for these differ- 

 ences, it must be considered that all the archteological data rela- 

 tive to the epoch of the reindeer are unanimous in attesting that 

 the man of that age was of a peaceful character. 



While, then, we are justified in believing that the men of the 

 caverns very rarely raised their hands against one another, it is 

 none the less certain that they led a bitter and truceless struggle 

 against animals. They therefore rarely had occasion to practice 

 the drawing of the human figure ; whence the great imperfections 

 of the figures of that kind as compared with the figures of 

 animals. 



