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Proceedings 31 
the oldest Cretan script.* When they attained to the Neolithic 
stage of culture, at any rate, they had some kind of religion, as 
is indicated by their mode of burial and their dolmens and 
stone circles. But what concerns us here is their astonishing 
artistic skill. They carved in relief and scratched on bone and 
on their cave-walls, and painted on the latter, figures of the 
animals they hunted. The artistic merit of these drawings varies 
very greatly. The best of them, as you are well aware, would 
do credit for realism and vigour to a modern artist. Such are 
the well-known representations of running and belling stags, 
long-haired mammoths, or grazing and charging bisons. Repre- 
sentations of men are extremely rare. Children, it has been 
noted, draw beasts before they are interested in the human 
figure. It is remarkable too that the animals represented are 
nearly all such as were objects of the chase. Lions, tigers, jackals, 
hyenas and wolves are absent, though we know that they lived 
in the country at the time. M. Salomon Reinach suggests that 
these drawings were magical, and intended to bring the desir- 
able beasts into the power of the huntert. 
Now in one of these late Quaternary caves, that of Mas 
d’ Azil, between Toulouse and the Pyrenees, the same cave 
where the quasi-alphabetic signs were found, there was discov- 
ered a few years ago a fragmentary disc of bone engraved on one 
side with an ordinary human figure and on the other with an 
enigmatic representation. Of the genuineness and antiquity of 
this relic there is no question. The late eminent French anthro- 
pologist, E. Piette, exhibited it in 1902 to the Society of An- 
thropology in Paris. A reproduction], together with a discussion 
of this strange figure, will be found in the Bulletin de la 
Société d Anthropologie de Paris, 1902, 3 sér. Ill. p. 771 ff. 
On the missing portion of the disc there must have been a 
bear, as a huge hairy outstretched paw armed with claws is 
visible. Facing it is a naked man or man-like animal grasping 
a thick shaft or branch, which he appears to be thrusting into 
* Facsimiles in Sergi, of. cz¢. p. 291. 
+ Lart et la magie, in L’ Anthropologie, xiv. 1903, p. 257ff. 
t Another in a small popularly written book by Dr. L. Wilser, 
Menschwerdung, Stuttgart, 1907, p. 27. 
