340 KANSAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 



To begin with sculpture : we must go very far back in the history 

 of art to find its beginning. In a most interesting article by Prof. 

 Flinders Petrie, in the November Harper's Monthly, 1903, he tells of 

 the wonderful finds he made of primitive sculpture in the "Ten 

 Temples of Abydos." He says (837): "The most curious and prob- 

 ably the oldest objects here were .some very elementary figures of 

 baboons and other purely natural stones. The figures were very 

 slightly worked. Rude lumps of limestone had been picked up 

 having a slight resemblance to the form of the sacred animal ; and 

 then a little pounding away of the surface had improved the shape 

 into an unmistakable likeness, helped out in some cases by ^a few 

 scratches of flint. We cannot but see here the primitive fetish 

 stones such as the Papuans now reverence. Thus we touch the Egyp- 

 tian behind all art and civilization, back in the time when the strong 

 resemblances of nature caught the attention of the mind as yet un- 

 trained to disentangle the connections of things. But these stones 

 found far below the polished statues of an Egyptian temple open our 

 eyes to the source of sculpture. Man did not at first carve a statue 

 from a block of stone, but he picked up some weird form that seemed 

 that it must be something else than'all the rest of the stones around 

 it ; he venerated it, he treasured it and improved it so as to piously help 

 nature ; and little by little he became bolder, until the finished statue 

 did not need the least resemblance of the block to start with. Such 

 are the glimpses of the rise of art that these studies give us, but these 

 were by no means the earliest examples of such notions as prehis- 

 toric man in Egypt had long existed, though we here touch a survival 

 of primitive ideas in these rude, untouched fetish stones set up in the 

 first and lowest temple of Abydos." 



But this is not early enough for us. We want to grope in the dark, 

 beyond the beginnings of history, and see if we cannot find indica- 

 tions of still earlier efforts — the very first^stirrings of the artistic in- 

 stinct. Perhaps the earliest examples of sculpture obtainable are 

 those found in the caves of FranceJandJSwitzerland, deep down under 

 masses of stalagmite, associated with animals of the reindeer period 

 which are now extinct or far removedjfrom those locations, where they 

 have lain for untold thousands of years, as those deposits were prob- 

 ably made at the close of the Glaciarperiod. W^hile these people lived 

 at a later period than the glacial man^whose remains are found in the 

 river gravel of the Somme, they are'not^yet in the Neolithic stage, for 

 they did not have polished-stonejimpleraents, but only roughly chipped 

 Paleolithic kuives. With^these^alone they^made some marvelous carv- 

 ings on horn and bone. As Charles Rau says ("Early Man in Eu- 

 rope"): "These people evinced, notwithstanding their otherwise low 



