SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 77 



them there. Whether these beliefs were originally 

 implanted in him when God breathed into his nostrils 

 the breath of life, or were taught to him by special 

 revelation, we do not know, but they were there as a 

 foundation on which he could, with the aid of his 

 sense of right and wrong, build a happy and harmless 

 life. That he did not always do so we have some sad 

 evidence, to be gathered even from his bones ; and 

 the testimony of tradition is that his great sin was 

 that of inhuman violence, and it was for this that he 

 was swept away by the Flood, and replaced by men of 

 more peaceful mould, whom but for that catastrophe 

 he would soon have annihilated. 



Carthaillac l devotes a chapter to the mortuary 

 customs of the men of the quaternary (palanthropic) 

 age. He shows that the statement sometimes made 

 that these men did not care for the dead is entirely 

 incorrect, though he believes that we know com- 

 paratively little of their burials, owing to the circum- 

 stance that only those in caverns were likely to be 

 preserved or discovered. The discoveries at Spy, in 

 Belgium, show that even the Canstadt race, the lowest 

 in development, and probably in art, interred the 

 bodies of their dead, while a large number of inter- 

 ments of the Cro-magnon race are known. He calls 

 attention to the fact that in all of these the body lies 

 on its side. The hands are brought up to the head 

 or neck, and the knees are bent, sometimes slightly, 

 sometimes very strongly, so as to give the body a 



1 Hommc Prehistorique. 



