io6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



This, in our opinion, was the origin of drawing, and, conse- 

 quently, of painting. It is worthy of remark that all works of 

 this kind derived from the embryonic period of the arts of de- 

 sign betray the same lack of proportion and absence of symmetry 

 characteristic of the silhouettes of shadows. The uniform im- 

 pression given by the drawings is that they relate, not to the 

 objects themselves, but to their shadows. It is further interest- 

 ing to note that some contemporary savages, some Australians, 

 for example, are still incapable of grasping the meaning of exact 

 images, while they readily comprehend a crude, disproportioned 

 drav/ing. Thus, to give them an idea of a man, you have to draw 

 him with a very large head ; a feature with which precisely cor- 

 responds a drawing representing a fisherman that has been found 

 in a cave in France. He has a greatly reduced body, but his 

 hand, armed with an enormous harpoon, is the hand of a giant. 



In his struggle with surrounding Nature, a struggle of which 

 he can not form an exact conception, primitive man had especial 

 need to possess every means that could give him confidence in vic- 

 tory. In starting for the hunt he took with him, as the North 

 American Indian does now, and as some players in our most civil- 

 ized circles do under another form, the fetich that would insure suc- 

 cess — that of an image of the animal to be killed. By engraving 

 on the handle of his knife the image of a reindeer or some other 

 animal, he did not think of ornamenting his weapon, but of exert- 

 ing some magic power over his prey. And his belief in this mys- 

 terious jDower, by giving him boldness, energy, and sureness of 

 movements, would often procure him success. Confidence does 

 thus in all things. Just like the modern savage, the cave man 

 would believe that the greater the resemblance between the image 

 and the animal, the greater also would be the chance of acting 

 upon the animal. Hence the care that was applied to the repro- 

 duction of the animals especially coveted and with which the con- 

 test would be hardest ; and hence those perfect designs of the rein- 

 deer, that magnificent game of our ancestors.* 



Very different are the characteristics of the drawings of hu- 

 man forms ; and, to account for these differences, we should con- 

 sider the fact that all the archseological data relative to the epoch 

 of the reindeer testify that the disposition of the man of that age 



* In this I differ from the students who find in some of these drawings evidence that 

 the reindeer was a domesticated animal at that time. A representation of two reindeer 

 has been found at Loz^re, one of which wears what is regarded as a kind of haher. But 

 the absence of fossil remains of dogs, without which domestication of the reindeer is im- 

 possible, pleads, as Carl Vogt remarks, against the existence of the domesticated reindeer. 

 In my opinion, this supposed halter represents rather the emblematic line of which I have 

 spoken, proceeding from the mouth to the heart, indicating the enchantment thrown at the 

 animal by the hunter. 



