FACULTY IN ABOEIGINAL EACES. 77 



Aquitauia, might be assigned with every probability to some Druid scribe, familiar with 

 the ogliam characters of the Gaiils aud British Celts. Amoug the objects recovered from 

 the Dordogue caves, inchxdiiig tallies aud iuscribed tablets of horn and ivory, with their 

 enumeration in simple units, M. Broca specially noted a deer's tyne, marked with a series 

 of notches, which he assumed to be a huuter's memoranda of the prodiice of the chase. A 

 more complex record, fouud in the rock-shelter of Gorge d'Enfer, is iuscribed on a plate of 

 ivory. Its groups of horizontal and oblique lines along the edges, and symmetrical rows of 

 dots on the flat surface, combine to furnish a record graven in characters as well defined 

 as many a runic or ogham inscription. If it be uo more than the memoranda of a success- 

 ful hunt, with a classification of the different kinds of game secured for distribution among 

 the members of the tribe, it is not greatly inferior to the system of niimeration among the 

 Egyptians. But when such a piece of arithmetic was supplemented by a pictorial record 

 of the hunt, or by the striking incident, so acceptable to a bevy of hunters over their camp- 

 fire, of the fight of the male deer in the rutting season, or the charge of the enraged 

 elephant with elevated trunk, trumpeting wrath and defiance, much had been accom- 

 plished that admits of comparison with the records of the modern penman.' 



It is difiiciilt for the men of a lettered age, with all the facilities of the printing-press 

 in fullest use, to realize the condition of intellectual activity, or the natural modes of its 

 expression, among an unlettered people. The transmission of Homeric or Ossiauic poems, 

 of a Niebelungen Lied or an Albanie Duan, from generation to generation, by the mere aid 

 of memory, is scarcely conceivable to us now. Yet I recall the account of Ozahwahgua- 

 quzuebe, an Ojibway Indian, who told of his habitually accumulating his tobacco till he 

 had saved enough to bribe an aged chief of the tribe to repeat to him, again and again, in all 

 its marvellous details, the legend of Nanaboozo and the post-diluvial creation, in order that 

 he might be able, in his turn, to recount it in full, as it had come down from elder genera- 

 tions of his people. 



There are some results of the introduction of the printing-press still very partially 

 appreciated. Its direct influence on social and intellectual progress receives ample recog- 

 nition ; but not so all indirect influences traceable to its operations. In elder centuries, 

 before Gutteuburg and Faust superseded the labours of the scribe, not a few ballad-epics 

 and lyrics were consigned to the wandering minstrels, to whose tenacious memories we 

 are so largely indebted. But there were other avenues in those old centuries for fancy 

 and passion, not greatly dissimilar to those by which the observation and descriptive 

 powers of the post-glacial Troglodytes found vent. It is vain for a Pugiu or a Ruskin to 

 bewail the mechanical character of modern art. It was easier for the medieA'al satirist to 

 find free scope fpr his humour in a sculptured corbel, or on a boss of the beautiful groined 

 ceiling, or to carve his grosser caricature within easy access under the miserere in the choir, 

 than to spend long hours at his lectern in the scriptorium, committing his fancies with 

 laborious pains to less accessible parchments. And so, both satires and sermons were then 

 graven in stone, which now find utterance in ways more suited to the age in which we live : 



" For luaturo brings not bark the Mastodon, 

 Nor we those times." 



Taste and fancy have now a thousand avenues at their command for the humour aud 



' See Prehistoric Man, 3rd Ed., ii. 54. 



