FACULTY IN ABORIGINAL RACES. 75 



putable. They fiiruish a record, more trustworthy than any written chronicle, of the 

 strange conditions of life, in a region familiar to us throughout the whole historic period 

 for its genial climate and social civilization. It is in this aspect as a contemporary chron- 

 icling of current events, — a newspaper of the day, — that palœolithic art has its chief value. 

 It ftirnishes a graphic picturing of the habits of life, and of many of the attendant circum- 

 stances of that remote period, recorded with such vivid truthfulness, that we realize very 

 definitely the character of its long extinct fauna; and, to some considerable extent, the 

 occupations and modes of life of the cave-men by whom they were hunted, and in hàsure 

 hours were reproduced graven or carved, on bone, horn or iA'ory, or traced in free outline 

 on slabs of schist or other soft stone. 



Viewed simply as examples of imitative art among a people still in the rudest Stone 

 Age, the drawings are significant and instructive. They furnish evidence of observation 

 and artistic capacity ; and consequently of intellectual powers, capable of very different 

 results from anything that could be realized in the absence of all knowledge of metallurgy, 

 or of anything beyond the crudest appliances for developing mechanical skill. The condi- 

 tions of climate probably forbade any attempt at agriculture. They were hunters, fowlers, 

 fishers, subsisting mainly, if not wholly, by the chase. They not only successfully pursued 

 the wild horse, the reindeer, and other swift-footed herbivora ; but assailed the cave-bear, 

 the cave-lion, and other formidable carnivora, as well as the huge rhinoceros and the mam- 

 moth. They also made excursions to the sea shore ; and no doubt left there shell-mounds 

 similar to those which have been explored with such interesting results on the Danish 

 coast ; and which haA'e their New World equiA^alents on the sea-boards of Massachusetts, 

 Georgia and Florida, where at certain seasons the Indians resorted to feast on the shell- 

 fish. From their drawings and carvings we not only learn this, but also that they were not 

 unfamiliar with the whale, the seal, and other marine fauna. The presence of the whale 

 and seal in the same latitud»^ as the reindeer need not surprise us. The occupation of 

 Europe by palœolithic man contemporary with the Elephas primigenius and other extinct 

 mammalia, belongs to an era when the relative levels of sea and land, and the relations of 

 the Atlantic coast-line to the, ancient continent, differed widely from their present con- 

 ditions. If the genial current of the Gulf stream then reached the shores of Europe, its 

 influence extended over areas very diverse from those now affected by it. But the range 

 of the fauna of the Palaeolithic Era was a wide one. Tvrsks of the mammoth and antlers 

 of the reindeer occur in the Scottish boulder-clay ; and the discoA^ery of skeletons of the 

 whale far inland in the carse of Stirling, accompanied in more than one case by harpoons 

 made of perforated stag's horn, tells of the presence of the Greenland whale on the ancient 

 Scottish sea coast, while the stag haunted its forests, and the allophylian savage paddled 

 his canoe in estuaries marked for us now by old sea-margins that preceded the last great 

 rise of the land. Skulls and horns of the elk occur in the Scottish peat bogs, seemingly 

 indistinguishable from those of the Cervus aires, or North American moose.' As to the 

 reindeer, not only are its remains found in Scottish mosses and the underlying marl, 

 but they have been dug up in the ruined brochs, as at Cill-Trolla, Sutherlandshire, and 

 Keiss in Caithness. The favourite haunts of the Greenland whale are in seas encumbered 

 with floating ice ; and when they were stranded in the estuary of the Forth by a tide 



Proc Soc. Autiq. Scot. vs.. 2'j7, oOl. 



