MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. 3il 



condition, a decided taste for drawing, and even for carving. Their 

 delineations, traced with a pointed flint on horn, bone, ivory, or slate, 

 consist of geometrical figures, but mostly of outlines of fishes, or of 

 the horse, reindeer, stag, ibex, auroch, mammoth, etc. These animals 

 appear singly or in groups, and often exhibit their characteristic 

 features in a degree to render them recognizable almost at first glance. 

 On a baton of reindeer horn are drawings of two fishes and a horse; 

 on a stag horn a dying stag, sitting on its haunches ; a reindeer horn 

 has the heads of two aurochs; on another are two horses and a man, 

 also a large eel ; on another are two reindeers in line. An interesting 

 carving is the handle of a dagger, like a leaping reindeer, with the 

 legs drawn under the body and the horns thrown back. None of the 

 representations afford as much interest, however, as those of the, 

 mammoth, of which several were discovered, engraved as well as 

 carved. The most remarkable one, traced on a plate of ivory — mam- 

 moth ivory — was found in the cave of La Madeline, in the south of 

 France. The drawing on this specimen is characteristic and bold, 

 and the peculiarities of the mammoth are faithfully depicted — the 

 full forehead, the long, curved tusks, the pendent trunk, and the long 

 mane of the neck. All these go to prove that man lived contempo- 

 raneous with the mammoth. This artistic tendency among a people 

 that occupied in other respects a very low position is indeed a per- 

 fect anomaly. At a much later period of the stone age, when he de- 

 voted himself to agricultural pursuits, early man produced nothing in 

 the line of art that can be compared with the drawings and carvings 

 of those historic people of the south of France." M. Broca said that 

 "It was with profound astonishment that we learned that long, long 

 before the artists of Egypt the men of the reindeer period cultivated 

 design and sculpture, and were good observers of nature. At the 

 French exposition of 1867 there was a case in the ethnological depart- 

 ment containing a most wonderful collection (fifty-one pieces) of the 

 art of the reindeer period in France. They were undoubtedly the 

 oldest and most original works on exhibition." 



Pottery was one of the earliest manifestations of primitive culture 

 and one of the first mediums for the expression of the artistic in- 

 stinct. Earthenware spoons date from the Neolithic or polished- 

 stone period, and are not as old as the Paleolithic times nor the bone 

 carvings. Spoons were, of course, derived from the simple bivalve 

 shells used to convey food to the mouth, and the form was reproduced 

 in wood and horn and bone before being produced in jDottery. It 

 was long a mooted question as to the comparative date of the origin 

 of baked pottery, whether Paleolithic or Neolithic, but the preference 

 is for the latter among anthropologists now. M. de Naidailac gives 



