PREHISTORIC ART IN AMERICA. 819 



teeth, the shoulder-blade of a reindeer, the long bones of deer, or on 

 stones or beach-pebbles, and included the huge cave-bear, the mam- 

 moth with its heavy mane and upturned tusks, the seal, the croco- 

 dile, and the horse. These drawings, the first efforts of man, are 

 crude in shape, but suggestive of vital action. One of the stag-horns, 

 engraved with representations of reindeer and fishes, is a almost a mas- 

 terpiece. The deer are following one another, and one of them has 

 turned to look back, doubtless so as to see her fawn ; the heads are all 

 drawn in profile and without foreshortening, as in the Egyptian paint- 

 ings and sculptures ; sometimes the lines are light, at other times they 

 are cut deeply to bring out certain parts. By a curious caprice the 

 artist, after having completed his first design, has put fishes in all the 

 vacant spaces, and they too are wonderfully truthful. M. Massenat 

 has discovered, at Laugerie Basse, a piece of reindeer-horn about ten 

 inches long, on which was plainly engraved an aurochs running from 

 a young man who is about to shoot an arrow at it. The animal has 

 its head down with its horns in a position of menace, expanded nos- 

 trils, and tail raised and curved, all being signs of terror and irrita- 

 tion. The man is naked and has a round head, with coarse hair, which 

 is brought up over the top of his head, and an obvious beard on the 

 chin. His whole physiognomy expresses joyousness and the excite- 

 ment of the chase. The women have flat breasts and prominent hips. 

 One of them, very hairy, is drawn between the legs of a deer, and 

 wears a collar around her neck. Unfortunately, her head is wanting. 

 A considerable number of engraved stones and bones have been 

 brought to light in the excavations of the cave of Thayngen, Switzer- 

 land. Among them is a reindeer, standing with its head inclined 

 toward the ground, and drawn with a precision showing a really re- 

 markable acquaintance with the form of the animal. The artist had 

 attained such perfection that observers were at first tempted to ask if 

 they had not been invited to look at one of the archaeological frauds 

 that have unhappily become so common. But the excavations had 

 been watched with unremitting care ; the witnesses of the discovery 

 were honorable men of science ; the calcareous deposit of more than 

 a yard thick had been taken up under their eyes ; there were found 

 in the cave reproductions of animals which had disappeared centuries 

 ago the musk-ox, for instance ; and the engraving was so faithful 

 that it could have been made only from nature. It was necessary, 

 then, to surrender to the evidence. Away back in the quaternary ages, 

 in the midst of the hardest conditions of life, of the struggle for 

 existence, and of incessant conflicts against the great pachyderms, the 

 bears, and the feline animals that swarmed around him, man already 

 had the feeling or the instinct of art. He tried to draw the likenesses 

 of the animals he saw and of the trees that shaded the cave he lived 

 in ; and the productions of his industry, found again after so many 

 ages, are all the more interesting from the fact that the extemporiz- 



