108 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



drawn portraits, all flattering and all famous ? Even so primitive man 

 has drawn himself many times over, not indeed on this particular piece 

 of reindeer-horn, but on several other media to be seen elsewhere, in 

 the original or in good copies. One of the best portraits is that dis- 

 covered in the old cave at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massenat, where 

 a very early pre-glacial man is represented in the act of hunting an 

 aurochs, at which he is casting a flint-tipped javelin. In this as in all 

 other pictures of the same epoch I regret to say that the ancient hunter 

 is represented in the costume of Adam before the fall. Our old mas- 

 ter's studies, in fact, are all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently 

 unacquainted as yet with the use of clothing, though primitive woman, 

 while still unclad, had already learned how to heighten her natural 

 charms by the simple addition of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, 

 though dresses were still wholly unknown, rouge was even then ex- 

 tremely fashionable among French ladies, and lumps of the ruddle 

 with w r hich primitive woman made herself beautiful forever are now 

 to be discovered in the corner of the cave where she had her little pre- 

 historic boudoir. To return to our hunter, however, who for aught 

 we know to the contrary may be our old master himself in person, he 

 is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with an arched back, re- 

 calling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head, long neck, pointed 

 beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I fear we must admit 

 that pre-glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry and awkward 

 figure. 



Was he black ? That we don't certainly know ; but all analogy 

 would lead one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the 

 whole, to be a very recent and novel improvement on the original evo- 

 lutionary pattern. At an}' rate he was distinctly hairy, like the 

 Ainos, or aborigines of Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella 

 Bird has drawn so startling and sensational a picture. Several of the 

 pre-glacial sketches show us lank and gawky savages with the body 

 covered with long scratches, answering exactly to the scratches which 

 represent the hanging hair of the mammoth, and suggesting that man 

 then still retained his old original hairy covering. The few skulls and 

 other fragments of skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that 

 our old master and his contemporaries much resembled in shape and 

 build the Australian black fellows, though their foreheads were lower 

 and more receding, while their front teeth still projected in huge 

 fangs, faintly recalling the immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite 

 apart from any theoretical considerations as to our probable descent 

 (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's hypothetical " hairy arboreal quadru- 

 manous ancestor," whose existence may or may not be really true, 

 there can be no doubt that the actual historical remains set before us 

 pre-glacial man as evidently approaching in several important respects 

 the higher monkeys. 



It is interesting to note, too, that while the Men of the Time still 



