102 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the proportions are outrageously violated. This is not an excep- 

 tion, for the examination of all the drawings of this kind shows 

 that skillful as were the men of those times in their drawings 

 of animals, particularly of those which were important to them, 

 they were bad delineators of the human figure. "I do not 

 know," says Broca, " what prevented them from reaching perfec- 

 tion on this point, but the fact is indisputable and is certainly 

 characteristic.''^ Another no less characteristic point is the entire 

 absence of designs representing plants. No design of a tree has 

 been found, or of a bush or a flower, unless we regard as a flower 

 the " three little rosettes " engraved on a handle of reindeer-horn, 

 which some authors actually regard as a composite flower. This 

 exclusive taste of the artists of the caves is evidently not acci- 

 dental, for chance exj)lains nothing ; and we can not assume, with 

 Carl Vogt, that primitive drawing originated in a general tend- 

 ency of man toward imitation of living Nature. "We believe that 

 the object of these artistic productions was of a different charac- 

 ter, and that they were intended, not for ornamentation of objects 

 or for imitation pure and simple of Nature, but for the production 

 of an instrument to be used in the struggle against Nature. We 

 shall endeavor to substantiate this proposition in what follows, 

 and shall have occasion to say something on the origin of painting 

 in general. 



We remark, first, that there is nothing to prove that the man 

 of that time was intellectually superior to existing savages ; and, 

 if we observe these, we shall find that their drawings have usually 

 a totally different significance from that which art has among 

 civilized peoples ; and that they have nothing in common with 

 ornamentation and Eesthetics in general. Indeed, numerous facts 

 go to show that human thought, in the lower degrees of its devel- 

 opment, distinguishes but poorly between subjective representa- 

 tions and objective reality, and that both give rise to the same 

 ideas. For example, a savage seeing one of his family in a dream, 

 can not imagine that the image is independent of the organic sub- 

 stance of the person in question ; and he will see the same relation 

 between the two as between a body and its image reflected by a 

 surface of water. Thus the Basutos believe that if the shadow of 

 a man is projected upon the water, the crocodiles will be able to 

 seize the man himself. A like identification may be pushed to 

 the point that tribes are known which use the same word for the 

 soul, the image, and the shadow. 



It is necessary to take this fact into consideration in order to 

 appreciate the real sense of the primitive design, and to re-estab- 

 lish the conditions under which it originated. If we suppose a 

 material relation between the image and the object as well as 

 between the shadow and the object, it becomes evident that the 



