After Cartailhac 



Two troops of horses, each with 



its leader, engraved on a slab of 



stone, from Le Chaffaud (Vienna) . 



Magdalenian stage 



here because no certain traces of 

 man appear before the dawn of the 

 Pleistocene Period. 



Possibly pictorial art was inven- 

 ted long before Aurignacian time, 

 but it is not until then that we find 

 evidences of it. The first discovery 

 of such evidence was in 1879 in the 

 cavern of Altamira. Before this date 

 many traces of early man had been 

 fovmd in France and Spain, espe- 

 cially in caves and rock-shelters, whence 

 came stone implements and bones 

 from which anthropologists began to piece out the story of the ages. 

 Yet no one ever dreamed of finding picture art galleries. So it was that in 

 1879 a Spanish nobleman, Marcellino de Sautuola, was industriously dig- 

 ging in a cave on his estate for stone implements and bones, while his little 

 daughter who accompanied him amused herself otherwise. She looked up 

 at the vaulted ceiling overhead and began to shout " Tows! Toros!" with 

 such spontaneous excitement that the more prosaic father paused to investi- 

 gate. Thereupon stone implements were forgotten. It is safe to say that 

 this little Spanish girl was the first person within many thousand years to 

 set eyes on those prehistoric paintings. 



What she saw can scarcely be described. The outlines of the figures as 

 shown in the drawing will give an idea and the color plate will perhaps 

 enable us to form a notion of the whole scheme. As we gaze at the pictures 

 one of the first things to impress us is the excellence of the drawing, the 

 proportions and the postures being unusually good. The grand bison 

 shown in the frontispiece and the charging boar are masterpieces in this 



respect. The next observation 

 may be that in spite of this perfec- 

 tion of technique there is no per- 

 spective composition — that is, no 

 attempt to combine or group the 

 figures, each standing alone as it 

 were oblivious of all others yet 

 crowding upon and even over its 

 many neighbors, regardless alike of 

 position, form or size. Except in 

 case of the foal and mother there 

 is not the least suggestion of natu- 

 ral association and even that exam- 

 After Capitnn and Breuii ple may bc largely accidental. 

 Engraving of a mammoth, spirited study j^ addition to these remarkable 



of an extinct animal from the walls of Les i i • . i i n « 



Combarciies. Aurignacian stage sketches m coior, the Other walls of 



290 



