THE OLD STONE AGE 
would have been entirely beyond his reasoning powers, 
based as these were upon a very limited fund of accumu- 
lated experience. He first attempted to control his food 
supply by resort to magic, the only means that he knew. 
That it was a mistaken method does not lessen the funda- 
mental importance of the step for the future of mankind, 
for once he had grasped the idea that he himself could in- 
crease the food available, it was only a question of time 
until he hit upon the right way of realizing it. 
In their efforts for the benefit of the larder the Cro- 
Magnon medicine men performed ceremonies in the deep- 
est recesses of the caves whose entrances they inhabited. 
The kinds of animals which they wished to render more 
plentiful they represented by drawings, images, or masks, 
with the aid of which they performed rites and incanta- 
tions. Some of the more backward races of the earth, like 
the Australian natives for instance, have never progressed 
beyond this stage, while traces of its former existence sur- 
vive among many more advanced peoples. 
The wonderful representations of animals, which the 
Cro-Magnon artists incised and painted on the walls of 
caves and molded in the damp clay of their floors (Plate 56) 
during the latter part of the Old Stone Age, have attracted 
attention and admiration the world over. Until a genera- 
tion or two ago modern man did not even suspect their ex- 
istence, and their discovery and study form one of the most 
fascinating and romantic chapters in the story of man’s 
recent inquiries into his own past. 
Many of these sketches are crude and roughly executed; 
but in others both drawing and workmanship are of a won- 
derfully high quality. The animals portrayed include the 
mammoth, wild bull, bison, cave bear, reindeer, stag, and at 
least two species of wild horse, as well as many others. 
Many reasons force us to believe that these works of art 
—for such they are—were executed mainly for magical 
purposes and not merely to satisfy a budding esthetic sense 
or to record incidents in the life of early man. In the first 
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