1394 LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



This seems a large demand upon each busy hfe; but, after all, 

 every tourist, every reader, worth the name, is so far on the way 

 to meet it. Summer schools here find their further attractions and 

 uses, like the one of which the course is outlined above. 



A CONDENSED SURVEY OF PRE-HISTORY AND HISTORY. 



— Yet most accessible, comprehensive, and rapid of all these in- 

 itiations so far, into the actual beginnings of our human world of 

 place, work, and people, and with much of history and nature-study 

 as weU, are oiu" vacation-courses in Dordogne, here worth recalling. 

 On the map of France, look some sixty miles east from Bordeaux 

 to the union of the Vezere and Dordogne rivers. Everyone has the 

 idea of a river-course with its valley-slopes, and these generally 

 gentle in the lower course, yet further up often steep, even to pre- 

 cipitous. But the Vezere, thanks to the character of the rocks along 

 its course, has done wonders, beyond any other valley we have seen 

 or easily can find the like of; by under-cutting its precipices, so far 

 as to yield characteristic ranges of shelter ("abris sous roche"), 

 under high cliffs, overhanging so far that at the village of Les 

 Eyzies, for instance, no drop of rain falls on the range of small 

 houses below, or even on the larger chateau beside them. Moreover, 

 these cliffs have many caverns, often reaching far back mto the 

 darkness, so the early shelter of wild beasts, until early man found 

 ways and means of expelling them and taking their place. But 

 caverns, although easily defended by their occupants, are damp, 

 and rheumatic accordingly, not to speak of dirt and its diseases; so 

 at Les Ej^'zies especially the long ranges of rock-shelters outside 

 them afforded the means of building dry huts outside the caverns. 

 Hence to this day there are some ten thousand of such dwellings 

 in France, particularly in the large region of which Dordogne in 

 general and Les Eyzies in particular are richest in caverns; so that 

 from what seems an ordinary small cottage, the living-room back- 

 door opens into the cavern mouth, through which we can peer into 

 the darkness, or explore it with its owner for guide ; so learning that 

 prehistoric and contemporary life are here amazingly continuous. 

 Here then is one of the very best and fullest of pilgrimage and 

 exploration centres for prehistoric archaeology, for in a single section 

 of a cavern-bed, one may see also its ideal museum, unarranged by 

 human hand, but simple cut bare. For there at bottom the lowest 

 gravel-layer shows no sign of human or animal life, but immediately 

 above this one sees here and there a flint too rough for positive 

 certainty as an implement, yet possibly an eoUth used by man at 

 his rudest, before he had reached skill to shape it. Above this, how- 

 ever, another layer, with rude but unmistakable palseoHthic imple- 

 ments left projecting from them; and so on above these, in layer 

 after layer, the more developed and now characteristic implemerits 



