no THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Glacial art. In another sketch, less well known, but not unworthy of 

 admiration, the early artist has given us with a few rapid hut admira- 

 ble strokes his own reminiscence of the effect produced upon him by 

 the sudden onslaught of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide 

 open, a perfect glimpse of elephantine fury. It forms a capital exam- 

 ple of early impressionism, respectfully recommended to the favorable 

 attention of Mr. J. M. Whistler. 



The reindeer, however, formed the favorite food and favorite model 

 of the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the 

 mammoth ; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these 

 early prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palaeolithic art 

 is undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, 

 in Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, 

 in which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a 

 Chinese artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing 

 of two reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and 

 unearthed in one of the caves of Perigord, though far inferior to the 

 Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit. 

 The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the 

 head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of 

 another. Cave-bears, fish, musk-sheep, foxes, and many other extinct 

 or existing animals, are also found among the archaic sculptures. 

 Probably all these creatures were used as food ; and it is even doubt- 

 ful whether the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. 

 To quote Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, "he lived in 

 a cave by the seas ; he lived itpon oysters and foes." The oysters are 

 quite undoubted, and the foes may be inferred with considerable cer- 

 tainty. 



I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather 

 question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, how- 

 ever, the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves 

 to show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive? 

 You can't speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of 

 extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense pri- 

 mordial. Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted 

 cannibals ; nevertheless, they could design far better than the modern 

 Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilized being 

 who is now calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his 

 own study. Between the cave-men of the pre-Glacial age and the hy- 

 pothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have 

 intervened innumerable generations of gradually improving intermedi- 

 ate forms. The old master, when he first makes his bow to us, naked 

 and not ashamed, in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand 

 and necklet of bear's teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is 

 nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human being, with 

 a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying dimly and mysteriously 



