76 DANIEL WILSON ON THE AETISTIO 



rising ou a shove-line now nearly thirty feet aboA'e the tide mark of the present day, the 

 highlands of Scotland were capped with perpetual snow, and great changes of level had 

 still to occur. But neither the whale nor tlie Eskimo retreated within the Arctic circle 

 because they could only be at home among polar ice and snow. Remains of the whale 

 in Scottish kitchen middens of greatly more modern date, show that it must have haunted 

 the Scottish shores when the temperature of the surrounding ocean differed little from that 

 of the present day. There is preserved in the museum of the Scottish Antic^uaries a drink- 

 ing-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a whale, which was found in a weem, or subter- 

 ranean dwelling, on the Isle of Eda}^, Orkney, along with implements of stone, horn, bone, 

 bronze and iron ; and other evidences of the presence of the whale in the Scottish seas are 

 of frequent occurrence. 



As to the ivory of the narwhal and the rostuugr, or walrus, it was in use by Scoto- 

 Scandinavian carvers at least as late as the presence of the reindeer in Scotland. A curious 

 large sword, probably of the fourteenth century, at Hawthornden, near Edinburgh, has 

 the hilt made of the narwhal's tusk ; and the famous Lewis chessmen, found at Uig in 

 the Isle of Lewis, as well as examples of chess and tablemen recovered from time to 

 time in other localities in Scotland, are all made of the walrus ivory, the " huel-bone " 

 of Chaucer. But when the whale haunted the shores to which the hunters of the Perigord 

 resorted, the Atlantic coast-line, we have reason to believe, differed wàdely from its pre- 

 sent aspect. It is doubtful if Britain was an island, in that age of the mammoth and 

 the reindeer of the Pyrenees, when art flourished in the A'alley of the Vézère, and men, 

 scarcely less strange than the long extinct fauna with which they contended and on 

 which they preyed, sheltered in their rock-dwellings from the ice and snow of what 

 is now familiar to us as the vine-clad sunny land of France. All this we learn from the 

 archteological remains of those old times ; and, especially in regard to the palouolithic 

 hunters of Southern France, from the carvings and gravings which, happily for us, they 

 executed, whether for pastime or as actual records. Like many of the native races of the 

 American continent at the present day, they employed their leisure time in carving in 

 bone, horn or ivory ; and like them too, as we believe, they applied their skill in graphic 

 art as a means of recording cA'ents and communicating facts to others. The broad palina- 

 ted antlers of the reindeer, prepared sections of mammoth ivory, and slabs of schist, all 

 furnished tablets en which they not only delineated the objects of the chase, but inci- 

 dents and observations of their daily experience. And if so, we have in such drawings 

 the pregnant germ of ideographic symbolism, and of hieroglyphic writing. By just such 

 a process of recording facts in a form readily intelligible to others, the early dwellers in 

 the Nile valley originated the mode of object-drawing and ideographic chronicling, from 

 which hieroglyphic, demotic, and ultimately, phonetic writing were evolved. 



It is not solely by inference, that we are led to surmise that the ingenious draftsmen 

 of Southern France had a higher aim than mere pastime in some, at least, of their graphic 

 devices. The relics recovered from the ancient caves include, along with the drawings, 

 what appear to be tallies and numerical records, unmistakalily indicative, not only of a 

 method of numeration, but of the growth of a system of mnemonic symbolism, and 

 distinctive graven characters, not greatly inferior to the primitive alphabets of Celtic or 

 Scandinavian lithology. It is curious, indeed, to find in use in Evirope's early post-glacial 

 period symbols which, but for their undoubted execution by the ancient cave-men of 



