100 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



worshiped. Educated Chinamen all profess to he disciples of 

 him and to read his works, and to be guided by his instructions. 

 In some respects they perhaps do, -but they put their own inter- 

 pretation upon the import of his teachings. There are no special 

 teachers to expound his works, and every one is free to place such 

 construction upon his teachings as his intelligence or impulses 

 may lead to. 



I am convinced that the power of the philosopher over his 

 people has been overestimated by foreigners generally, and that 

 the real nature and scope of his work have been largely misappre- 

 hended. 



I 



THE ORIGIN OF PAINTING. 



By M. LAZAE POPOFF. 



T is said repeatedly, as of course, that Egypt was the cradle of 

 the arts. Yet archaeologists like Lartet, Garrigue, Cristi, and 

 others have shown that the first artistic manifestations go back 

 to epochs far anterior to the ancient Egyptians. According to 

 these authors, these first manifestations were contemporary with 

 the presence of the reindeer in the south of France— when the 

 mammoth had not yet quite disappeared, and when man, ignorant 

 of the metals, made all his instruments of stone, bone, and wood. 

 In fact, the first works of art, and particularly the first efforts at 

 drawing, date from those prehistoric times. In France, the oldest 

 remains of these works of art have been found, in the shape of 

 drawings engraved with a flint point as ornaments on articles of 

 reindeer-horn, in caves by the side of the fossil remains of animals 

 which, like the mammoth, have since disappeared, or, like the rein- 

 deer, have abandoned those regions. Other drawings have been 

 found on tablets of stone, horn, or mammoth-ivory. 



It is not our intention to insist on the simply linear rudiment- 

 ary designs of which these ornaments consist. We rather invite 

 attention to more perfect and characteristic works, in which, ac- 

 cording to the words of Carl Vogt, the spirit of observation and 

 imitation of Nature, and especially of living Nature, is remarkably 

 manifested. An image of a mammoth, found in the cave of La 

 Magdelaine, in the Dordogne, is engraved on a tablet of mammoth- 

 bone. Very striking are the ungainly attitude of the animal's 

 massive body, its long hair, the form of its elevated skull, with 

 concave forehead, and its enormous recurved tusks. All these 

 traits, characteristic of this extinct type of pachyderm, are repro- 

 duced by the designer with a really artistic distinctness. The 

 mammoth was already rare in Europe when this primitive artist 

 lived ; and this, perhaps, is the reason why only two of the numer- 



