A VERY OLD MASTER. 107 



era, or vice versa. Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 

 years ago this eccentricity of the eai'th's orbit was at its highest, so 

 that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either hemisphere 

 alternately then set in ; and such cold spells it was that produced the 

 Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about 80,000 

 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the climate 

 of Britain and the neighboring continent with its existing inconvenient 

 Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good reasons for believing 

 that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before the great- 

 est cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate descendants, with 

 the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of Europe, or out 

 of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice-sheet, we may, 

 I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere about b. c. 248,000. 

 In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate 

 of the twenty-five thousandth century, that 



" He lived in the long, loog agoes ; 

 'Twas the manner of primitive man." 



The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-glacial Europe, 

 just at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in 

 France by the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this 

 fact from the character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a 

 fauna in which species of cold and warm climates are at times quite 

 capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth 

 side by side with the hippopotamus and the hyena ; we find the chilly 

 cave-bear and the Norway lemming, the musk-sheep and the Arctic fox 

 in the same deposits with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the 

 rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed 

 out, we live to-day in a zoologically impoverished world, from which 

 all the largest, fiercest, and most remarkable animals have lately been 

 weeded out. And it was in all probability the coming on of the Ice 

 Age that did the weeding. Our Zoo can boast no mammoth and no 

 mastodon. The saber-toothed lion has gone the way of all flesh ; the 

 deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the Pliocene Age no longer 

 browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old master saw the last 

 of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds ; it was his hand, 

 or that of one among his fellows, that scratched the famous mam- 

 moth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine, and carved the figure of 

 the extinct cave-bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse. 

 Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the 

 Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells 

 with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was 

 then from time to time agreeably diversified. 



And what did the old master himself look like ? Well, painters 

 have always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have 

 we not the familiar young Raphael painted by himself, and the Rem- 

 brandt, and the Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self- 



