CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



or deer-horn, and equally proved to have been 

 made there, by the presence of the remnants of the 

 bones and horns from which they had been sawn, 

 and by numbers of the implements themselves 

 being in an unfinished state. They consist of 

 square chisel-shaped implements ; round, sharp- 

 pointed, awl-like tools, some of which may also 

 have served as the spikes of fish-hooks ; harpoon- 



Fig- 9- Barbed Bone Harpoon, 3$ inches long. 



shaped lance-heads, plain or barbed ; arrow-heads 

 with many, and sometimes double barbs, cut with 

 wonderful vigour; and, lastly, eyed needles of 



Fig. 10. 



a, Needle of Bone, 3 inches ; b, Eyeborer of Flint, i inches long. 



compact bone, finely pointed, polished, and 

 drilled, with round eyes so small and regular that 

 some of the most assured and acute believers in 

 all other findings might well doubt whether, in- 

 deed, they could have been drilled with stone, until 

 their actual repetition by the very stone imple- 

 ments found with them, dispelled their doubts.' 



Relative Ages. Differences are detected in the 

 character of the remains from the different caves 

 of this valley, which are thought to imply that they 

 are not all of the same age. The French savants 

 have divided the whole period represented by their 

 occupation into four ' Ages,' but it may be doubted 

 whether this large generalisation from the remains 

 in such a limited locality is fairly warranted. 



Thus, the progress of the civilisation of the 

 caves is sought to be traced, through a series 

 of ages, from the completely uncivilised trog- 

 lodytes of Le Moustier, who had few or no 

 implements beyond the rudest types in flint, to 

 the more advanced inhabitants of La Madelaine 

 and Les Eyzies, who had not only arrived 

 at great perfection in the manufacture of their 

 implements of flint, but had attained to an 

 important evolution in industry, in the appli- 

 cation of their flint tools to the fabrication of other 

 tools of bone, and had also developed an artistic 

 taste, which led them to lavish their labour in the 

 production of ornamental designs. 



Peculiar Characteristics. Three striking pecu- 

 liarities are specially observable in the group of 

 implements from these French caves : First, the 

 entire absence of implements of polished stone ; 

 second, the extreme neatness of form and finish, 

 and the adaptive ingenuity displayed in the im- 

 plements of bone ; and third, the extraordinary 

 faculty which 'the cave-dwellers have manifested 

 in their carvings and etchings, or engravings on 

 bone. These engravings and carvings are not 



726 



peculiar to the French caves, but they have been 

 discovered in great numbers since their first 



Fig. T I. Baton of Deer-horn, with Figures of Animals* 

 a, Reindeer, on obverse ; b, Horses, on reverse side. 



appearance excited a new sensation in the ar- 

 chaeological world. The catalogue now includes 

 representations in bone or deer-horn of almost all 

 the animals whose remains are found in the caves> 



Fig. 12. Piece of Fossil Ivory, 10 inches long, with 

 engraved Figure of Mammoth. 



including, of animals now extinct, the mammoth, 

 reindeer, cave-lion, cave-bear, and aurochs ; and of 

 existing species, the stag, the horse, the goat r 

 birds, fishes, and reptiles. Nor is the list limited 

 to the portrayal of the lower orders of creation. 

 Representations of ' the human form divine,' as it 

 is supposed to have manifested itself in the ' age 

 of the mammoth and reindeer,' are not wanting. 

 And it is hard, indeed, to understand how the 

 man endowed with the active mind in which the 

 conception originated, the observant eye which 

 caught the pose and contour of the figure, and the 

 capable hand which not only executed the carving 

 with really artistic grace and spirit, but extem- 

 porised the graving tools from the materials 

 immediately at command, should have been in- 

 capable of taking the one single step which divides 

 the rudest from the most advanced type of stone 

 implements. 



Grade of Civilisation. Disregarding this mani- 

 festation of a certain degree of artistic skill as a 

 feature occasionally exhibited by savage races, the 

 grade of civilisation and social condition of these 

 cave-dwellers seems not without a parallel at the 

 present day. In a Description of the Nations oj 

 the Empire of Russia, published at St Petersburg: 

 in 1776, the tribes of the Tchouktches, who occupy 

 the most easterly promontory of Siberia, lying 

 between the Northern Ocean and the Pacific, are 

 described as living in communities, sometimes 

 comprising a hundred individuals, in underground 



