110 A VERY OLD MASTER 



The work of art was dug up from under the firm con- 

 creted floor of a cave in the Dordogne. That cave was 

 once nhabited by the nameless artist himself, his wife, 

 and family. It had been previously tenanted by various 

 other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have 

 lived there in the intervals between the different human 

 occupiers. Probably the bears ejected the men, and the 

 men in turn ejected the bears, by the summary process of 

 eating one another up. In any case the freehold of the 

 cave was at last settled upon our early French artist. But 

 the date of his occupancy is by no means recent ; for since 

 he lived there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice 

 Age, or Glacial Epoch, has swept over the whole of 

 Northern Europe, and swept before it the shivering 

 descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now, 

 how long ago was the Great Ice Age ? As a rule, if you 

 ask a geologist for a definite date, you will find him very 

 chary of giving you a distinct answer. He knows that 

 the chalk is older than the London clay, and the oolite 

 than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite ; and he 

 knows also that each of them took a very long time indeed 

 to lay down, but exactly how long he has no notion. If 

 you say to him, ' Is it a million years since the chalk was 

 deposited ? ' he will answer, like the old lady of Prague, 

 whose ideas were excessively vague, ' Perhaps.' If you 

 suggest five millions, he will answer oracularly once more, 

 ' Perhaps ' ; and if you go on to twenty millions, ' Perhaps,' 

 with a broad smile, is still the only confession of faith that 

 torture will wring out of him. But in the matter of the 

 Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost historical 

 event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve 

 on this chronological question and condescended to give 

 us a numerical determination. And here is how Dr. Croll 

 gets at it. 



