1890-91.] BONE CAVES. 119 



Long ago, in a paper read before a section of this Institute, the writer 

 combatted the notion that at any epoch one great ice sheet was moving 

 steadily, over mountain and valley, from Muskoka into Pennsylvania, 

 Ohio and New York ; holding that when there was perennial ice on our 

 hills it could only follow the slopes. This view has come to be acknow- 

 ledged, and authorities will now allow some glacier ice to have moved 

 even northward into the prehistoric St. Lawrence, and so on. There 

 now exists in his mind a doubt whether at any time there was a 

 general glacial epoch in the sense the term is used, viz., a reign 

 of cold over the Northern Hemisphere. There has been, it rather 

 seems, a transference from one centre to another of the locality at which 

 precipitation and congelation enough takes place to form glaciers and 

 sheets or caps of ice. If the chief examples are in America to-day, they 

 may at another epoch have been in Europe, and at yet an )ther in Asia. 

 At no time, one begins to think, was there more ice and glacial action 

 over the Northern Hemisphere as a whole than there is to-day. These 

 changes of cold-centres, which are closely connected with changes of 

 areas of evaporation and of aerial humidity, to account for which no 

 nutation or libration of the earth's poles is needed, may have been quite 

 rapid, sufficiently so to have influenced within the time of prehistoric 

 man, the local distributions of types of animals. 



One of the most interesting and noted pictures in the Paris Salon of 

 1889, exhibited in London in 1890, represented a prehistoric man, 

 naked but for a shawl of skins, coming back to his cave with some 

 trophies of the chase. He was meeting at the cavern mouth a fearful 

 sight : his wife (a lovely shape, just like a Paris artists' model of to-day), 

 lying dead at the entrance, and a lion carrying off in its mouth one of 

 his children. This embodied on one canvas many of the ideas European 

 writers have encouraged. We may be certain, however, considering the 

 habits of our Indians (i), that prehistoric man lived in reasonable safety 

 from wild beasts, which would then, as now, rather flee from than attack 

 the haunts of men. Fires, lances, arrows were surely effective for 

 defence and protection. (2). Man of the stone ages was certainly 

 clothed, as a protection against cold ; the scrapers and knives were to 

 tan or dress his furs ; the drills, needles and other such implements were 

 used to make his covering. With equal certainty he would have gar- 

 ments which would be convenient and would not hinder him in going 

 through the forest, across the plain, or over the mountain slope. (3). 

 The woman was not of the type of the fair skinned Venus de Medici, 

 with delicate fingers unused to toil. (4). The children were not as 

 lovely, except in their parents' eyes, as Raphael's cherubs. With this 

 let us leave the artist. 



