appendix: elephant pipes and inscribed tablets. 321 



brought with them a drawing of the animal as it still survives in that 

 country. But the characteristic wavy lines of the long hair of the 

 mammoth allow no escape from the conclusion that the cave men saw 

 this animal in life, and that they were sufficiently advanced to make a 

 tolerably faithful sketch of it." If the sketch, or sketches, in question 

 had represented the elephant, or mastodon, whose remains are found 

 there, as well as in almost all parts of the world, the presumption of 

 coeval existence of artist and animal would be well-nigh conclusive. 

 But the sketches represent the hairy mammoth, that is not known to 

 have ever lived within a thousand miles of that locality. So far as I 

 have ever been able to learn, no remains of this identical species of 

 pachyderm have ever been found in France; and no other fragments 

 of ivory, or other representations of elephant or mammoth, have yet 

 been discovered there, except in that one locality. 



These "cave men," among whose remains those wonderful inscribed 

 fragments of ivory were found, it must be borne in mind, belonged to 

 the "reindeer period" of human* civilization, and were, beyond doubt, 

 exotics of far northern or north-eastern origin. They were essentially 

 hunters, who had, for some reason, migrated from a distant region to 

 the more genial valleys of P'rance and Switzerland, and brought with 

 them their arts and iheir reindeer herds. Though troglodytes, and 

 perhaps cannibals, they had advanced, in no mean degree, in some of 

 the arts, as is seen in their implements of stone and horn and in their 

 neat carvings. Compared with their clear and expressive representa- 

 tions of the reindeer, fish, horse, etc., sculptured on horn, the pictures 

 of the hairy mammoth on the ivory fragments are the merest scratches. 

 These and other considerations have convinced me that those curious 

 pieces of ivory, with the amazing records they bear, were brought by 

 the reindeer men in their exodus from their former homes, and were 

 the highly prized trophies of some daring party that had i)enetrated to 

 the frigid north, and there saw, frozen in the ice, the carcass of the 

 great animal they essayed to portray on bits of its own ivory, in order 

 to bring to their tribe tangible proof of what they had seen; just as 

 the Tungusian hunter who, at the beginning of this century, discov- 

 ered, frozen in the ice of the Lena delta, the body of one of the same 

 great hairy mammoths — now in part preserved at St. Petersburg — and 

 cut off its tusks and carried them home to verify his marvelous find. 



The late Col. J. W. Foster, LL.D., stated that bones of the masto- 

 don had been found, in the Mississippi Valley, so recently dead, and 

 containing yet so great an amount of animal matter, that a nourishing 

 soup could be made of them I What nonsense ! With all the knowl- 

 edge we have of the existence of the elephants on this continent, is 

 there a geologist of reputation who will assert that we have positive 

 proof that even a single individual of them survived the latest glacial, or 

 drift, period? The very freshest of their remains would yield no more 

 " soup " than would a chunk of granite or hematite. 



With all the evidence of man's early occupancy of this continent 

 before us, including the many instances of association of his remains 

 and vestiges of his arts with the remains of gigantic extinct animals — 



