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Proceedings 33 
In the French journal L’ Anthropologie, 1904, xv., p.625ff,, 
two distinguished scientific observers, M. E. Cartailhac and the 
Abbé Breuil, give a short account of a cavern they have explor- 
ed in N. Spain, that of Altamira, near Santillana in the hills 
behind Santander. They have since drawn up a fuller report, 
. of which I have only seen a brief abstract. From the end of the 
Pleistocene Period until its discovery in 1879 this cave was 
closed by falls of rock. It contains not only sketches which it is 
thought were first attempts to devise a hieroglyphic system, but 
also numerous pictures scratched and painted on the walls, of 
very varying degrees of merit. The wild horse, ox, goat, bison, 
deer and wild boar are depicted. The explorers certify the gen- 
uineness of the drawings and ascribe their origin to the period 
of the French caves. Among the figures some of the roughest 
sketches, two of which are reproduced in the above-mentioned 
journal, bear a certain resemblance to the figure of Mas d’ Azil. 
In the words of the investigators, ‘a relatively considerable num- 
ber of these drawings represent strange silhouettes, the meaning 
of which left us at first dreamy and hesitating; but their analo- 
gies and the comparisons which they suggest leave no doubt as 
to their signification, and the discoveries made since in our 
French caves have confirmed us in the conclusion that they are 
human beings, doubtless incorrect and devoid of all expression, 
but recognizable after all by the arms, the legs when there are 
any, the rump, the phallus, and in some cases the ear. But none 
has the face of a man, and all are furnished with strange muz- 
zles, just like those which the Eskimos or Redskin sorcerers put 
on as masks for their magic dances. The drawing of Mas d’Azil 
. . . of a man with the head of a carnivore, dancing naked 
is iaaeobably related to these fellows of Altamira. The gesture of 
the arms stretched out in front or raised in the air is so often 
repeated that we can hardly believe the artists only portrayed 
this attitude because they did not know where to place them. 
One cannot ignore the analogy of this gesture with that which 
in all antiquity and nearly all peoples indicates supplication and 
prayer.’ The opinion that we have here and at Mas d’ Azil, 
men performing rites in beast-masks was shared by M. Boule. 
Now however MM. Cartailhac and Breuil have made a more 
