BO DR. DANIEL WILSON ON 
great glaciers in southern France gave the preference to bone and ivory over flint or stone, 
because the climatic conditions under which they lived rendered those most accessible 
to them; and we see in the familiar types of flint arrow-heads, stone-hammers, and 
the like primitive tools of savage man, both in ancient and modern times, how naturally 
the workman, with the same materials and similar necessities, shapes his few and simple 
Weapons and implements into like form. As to the absence of pottery, alike among the 
ancient cave-dwellers and the modern Eskimos, in which Professor Dawkins finds another 
element of resemblance, it proves no more than that both had to work under climatic con- 
ditions which rendered clay, adequate fuel, and nearly all other appliances of the potter, 
even less available than flint and stone. 
But the caves of the Vézère have furnished examples not only of skulls, but of complete 
skeletons of an ancient race of cave-dwellers, whether that of the ingenious draughtsmen 
and reindeer hunters or not ; and had those, or the underlying débris, yielded any traces of 
the Eskimo type of head, there would then be good reason for attaching an exceptional 
value to any evidence of correspondence in arts and habits. But the cerebral capacity of 
this Cro-Magnon race amply accords with the artistic skill, and the sense of beauty and 
grace of natural form, ascribed to the ancient draughtmen ; and their well-developed 
skulls and large bones present, in every respect, the most striking contrast to the stunted 
Eskimo. The strongly marked physiognomy of the former bears no resemblance to the 
debased Mongolian type of the latter. No doubt it may be argued with sufficient plau- 
sibility that in the slow retreat of the palæolithic race of the valley of the Vézère over sub- 
merging continents, since engulphed in the ocean; and in the vast æons of glacial or sub- 
glacial changes which have marked their migration to another hemisphere, and their retreat 
to their latest home on the verge of the pole, any amount of change may have modified the 
physical characteristics of the race. But if so, the evidence of their pedigree is no longer 
producible. The Eskimo may indeed be related by descent to the men of the French 
reindeer period ; as we ourselves may be descendants of paleeolithic man; but, as Professor 
Geikie has justly remarked: “When anthropologists produce from some of the caves 
occupied by the reindeer hunters a cranium resembling that of the living Eskimo, it will 
be time enough to admit that the latter has descended from the former. But, unfortunately 
for the view here referred to, none of the skulls hitherto found affords it any support.” * 
In truth, the plausible fancy that the discoveries of the last twenty years have tended to con- 
firm the identification of the cave-men with the Eskimos, only requires the full apprecia- 
tion of all that it involves, in order that it shall take its place with that other identifica- 
tion with the red man of the present day of “ Dr. Dowler’s sub-cypress Indian who dwelt 
on the site of New Orleans 57,000 years ago.” 
The received interpretation of the imperfect record which remains to us of the successive 
eras of geological change with the accompanying modifications of animal life, down to 
the appearance of man as an inhabitant of this world; and the deciphering of geological 
chroniclings as a coherent disclosure of the past history of the earth: are largely due to Sir 
Charles Lyell. In 1841, he visited this continent, and then estimated with cautious 
conservatism some of the evidences adduced for the assumed antiquity of American man. 
But subsequent observations led him to modify his views; and at length, in 1863, he 

* Prehistoric Europe, p. 550. 
