34 BALCH— ART AND ETHNOLOGY. [April 23, 



to make one revert to the older theory of five main races, if indeed 

 it does not point to more than five. For it seems as if there were 

 sufficiently numerous distinct arts, with sufficiently individual racial 

 characteristics, as to necessitate the classifying them provisionally 

 into at least five and possibly more main classes, corresponding to 

 the five or more races of man from which these arts spring. 



Let me now give you some concrete examples of how art can 

 help clear up ethnology. Take the Pleistokene men of western cen- 

 tral Europe, usually mistakenly called the Cave men. We have no 

 written records from the Pleistokenes, but we have implements and 

 art. Their implements show that they must have lived near the 

 edge of a great ice sheet and that their habits must have been not 

 unlike those of the Eskimo of to-day. But their art tells us a great 

 deal of which the implements give no hint. In the first place Pleis- 

 tokent arts tells us the fauna amongst which these men lived. It 

 takes us back to a past geological epoch, when the mammoth and 

 the woolly rhinoceros tichorinus roamed over western Europe. It 

 proves and is the only proof that they had domesticated the horse 

 and possibly the dog and that they lived sometimes in habitations not 

 unlike the teepees of the Red Amerinds. In the next place Pleisto- 

 kene art reveals the fact that these earliest positively known men 

 were unquestionably advanced in some mental characteristics. They 

 had certainly stopped hanging on by their tails. No one who was 

 not distinctly intelligent could possibly have made their sculptures, 

 their drawings and their paintings. Another fact their art shows is 

 that in all probability they were not a Negroid race. Ordinary 

 Bantu art, and also the art of Great Benin, is too unlike Pleistokene 

 art to warrant the belief that its makers could have been blood rela- 

 tions of the Pleistokenes. Certain qualities of Pleistokene art sug- 

 gest early Greek art, but there are more resemblances which suggest 

 Chinese or Eskimo work, so that the evidence of art, and it is the 

 strongest evidence on the subject, is that the earliest known race was 

 a yellow race. 



Take the case of the eastern United States. Mr. Henry C. 

 Mercer, I believe, and many other ethnologists claim that there is 

 no civilization preceding that of the Amerinds or American Indians 

 on this continent. Dr. Charles C. Abbott per contra claims that 



