7 oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



kept their dwellings carefully shut against such intruders. But what 

 were the means employed to keep them out ? In sepulchral caves we 

 find the entrance closed by a stone slab ; but a dwelling-place would 

 require a door more easily opened and shut than that. Besides, we 

 find no trace whatsoever of stone doors, and therefore it is supposed 

 that the Troglodytes barricaded their door-ways with hurdles. 



They lived by the chase, and by fishing. But, did they use vege- 

 table food ? We cannot find any evidence that they did. There have 

 been discovered, it is true, in the caves of Les Eyzies, Laugerie-Basse, 

 and La Madelaine, a number of stones granite, freestone and quartzite 

 worn round and smooth by rubbing, which exhibit on one side a pretty 

 regular depression, in the form of a cupule, and not unlike a small mor- 

 tar (Fig. 1). Some have supposed that this cupule might have been 

 intended to receive the end of a piece of dry wood, which would then 

 be whirled between the hands to produce fire, according to the well- 

 known process in use among the ancient Aryans, and among some 

 savage tribes of the present day. But the depression is too shallow, 

 considering its diameter, to have served such a purpose, and hence we 

 take these stones to have been mortars, while other round stones, of 

 dimensions answering to the cupules, would serve as pestles. Hence 

 came the supposition that the Troglodytes brayed grain for food : 

 but every thing goes to show that they were unacquainted with agri- 

 culture. It is far more probable that they used the mortars to pound 

 fish, or to grind pigments. 



Their chief occupation and their principal resource was the chase. 

 The remnants of bones accumulated in the soil forming the floor of 

 the caves, show that they hunted animals of every size, from the little 

 bird to the mammoth. That old giant of the early Quaternary period 

 still survived, but had now become rare. . For a long time it was sup- 

 posed that the mammoth became extinct about the middle of that 

 period ; and when it was announced that several teeth of that animal 

 and sundry pieces of wrought ivory had been discovered in the most 

 recent Troglodytic stations of the Vezere, many persons were of opin- 

 ion that these remains must have come down from an earlier period, 

 and been gathered by our Troglodytes, just as the inhabitants of 

 Siberia do at present. But it must be remembered that the carcasses 

 of mammoths found in Siberia have been preserved by the extreme 

 cold, and consequently their flesh and ivory are still fresh, whereas, 

 fossil ivory is so cracked and foliated as to be useless for the purposes 

 of art. Now, the climate of France in the Reindeer Age, though still 

 frigid, had long ceased to be glacial ; and, even though the men of that 

 period had been accustomed to dig the earth and they were not the 

 fossil ivory they might have found would have been unserviceable. 

 Therefore, the mammoths, whose ivory they wrought, must have been 

 contemporary with themselves. Of this conclusion we have a decisive 

 proof in the plate of ivory discovered at the La Madelaine, in 1864, by 



