PRIMEVAL MAN 209 



hand of him. The elephant greatly impressed 

 the imagination of this primitive man, and it 

 still greatly impresses it; as will be seen by any 

 one who studies the carvings and pictures of 

 our ancestors of the glacial and postglacial ep- 

 ochs, or who at the present day listens to the 

 talk of his black gun-bearers round an African 

 camp-fire. The horse was and is a quarry as 

 eagerly followed by primitive man as by the 

 lion himself. Ages elapsed before the horse, 

 and finally even "my lord the elephant" were 

 tamed by man, as man developed something 

 that could properly be called a culture. The 

 savages who, when England was merely a pen- 

 insula of continental Europe, dwelt by the banks 

 of the mighty rivers which have since shrunk 

 into the present Rhine and Seine, looked on the 

 mammoth and the coarse-headed wild horse of 

 their day as furnishing the flesh their stomachs 

 craved, precisely as the savages of the Nile and 

 the Zambesi now look on the African elephant 

 and the zebra. 



This Age of Primitive Man, this Age of the 

 Horse, the Lion, and the Elephant, like all 

 other historical or geological "ages," lasted 

 longer in some places than in others, and, in- 

 stead of having sharply defined limits, merged 

 gradually into the preceding and succeeding 



