328 THE TROGLODYTES. 



Now the climate of the Vezere, at the age of the reindeer, although 

 still cold, had loug ceased to be glacial, and if the men of the period had 

 dug iuto the soil, which they did not, the fossil ivory they found would 

 have been of no use. The mammoths, then, whose ivory they carved, 

 must have been their contemporaries. We have besides a decisive proof 

 of this. Here is a cast (see Fig. 12) of an ivory plate discovered in 1864 

 at the Madelaine by MM. Ed. Lartet, de Verueuil, and Falconer. Upon 

 this plate is engraved a representation of the mammoth, with his large 

 head, concave forehead, his curved tusks, his small eye, his trunk, his 

 curled-up tail, and his long mane; in fact, exactly such a mammoth as 

 perpetual frost has preserved, until our day, on the shore of the Lena. 



The troglodytes of the age of the reindeer did not often encounter 

 the mammoth. They more frequently hunted the boar, the horse, the 

 ox. It was undoubtedly for combat with these large animals that they 

 still retained some large lances armed with flint, diflering little from 

 those of Moustier. But their weapons were mostly light, and arrow- 

 heads of horn had replaced the flint points of the anterior periods. 



The bow had become the principal weapon. The animal, as we have 

 said, no longer defied man, but fled before him, and the combat was 

 succeeded by the chase. There were two kinds of arrows. The small- 

 pointed arrow, not barbed, for the smaller animals and birds, and the 

 large arrow, with double rows of barbs, which was chiefly used in killing 

 the reindeer. Light lances terminated with flattened points, darts with 

 conical points, and long and sharp j)oignards, completed the equipment 

 of the huntsman. 



I was about to forget the rallying whistle. This was a bone of the 

 reindeer, at one end pierced by an oblique hole, which did not pass 

 entirely through the bone, but only to the medullary canal. By blow- 

 ing upon this hole as upon a hollow key, sound can still be produced. 



Fish furnished a means of support for our later troglodytes, unknown 

 to their predecessors. Their various localities contain a great many 

 bones, and, what is worthy of remark, they all belong to the fishes of the 

 salmon species. 'Sow, the salmon of the present day does not come up 

 as high as the Vezere, nor even to that part of the Dordogne into which 

 that river empties. A few leagues .below the confluence of the two 

 streams, not far from Lalinde, there exists in the bed of the Dordogne a 

 bank of rocks, which in high water forms a rapid, and at low water a 

 regular cascade, called the Sant de la Gratusse. This is the jiresent limit 

 of the salmon, and as, in the days of the troglodytes, they did not stop 

 here, we must conclude that the level of the Dordogne since then has 

 lowered, either by the wearing down of the bed of the river, which uncov- 

 ered the rocks, or by loss of a i)ortion of the waters. 



These antique fishermen evidently did not use nets, for with nets all 

 kinds of fish are taken. Their sole instrument was the harpoon, with 

 which they could only catch the large fish, and among these they chose 

 the one whose flesh they preferred. Had they boats for fishing ? There 



