112 A VERY OLD MASTER 



rest on trust) owing to the combination of these pro- 

 foundly interesting causes, I say, there occur certain 

 periods in the world's life when for a very long time to- 

 gether (10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern 

 hemisphere is warmer than the southern, or vice versa. 

 Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that about 250,000 years ago 

 this eccentricity of the earth's orbit was at its highest, so 

 that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either 

 hemisphere alternately then set in ; and such cold spells it 

 was that produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. 

 They went on till about 80,000 years ago, when they 

 stopped short for the present, leaving the climate of 

 Britain and the neighbouring continent with its existing 

 inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are 

 good reasons for believing that my old master and his 

 contemporaries lived just before the greatest cold of the 

 Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate descendants, with 

 the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of 

 Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the 

 enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that 

 his date was somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case 

 we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew Lang, the 

 laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that 



He lived in the long long agoes ; 

 'Twas the manner of primitive man. 



The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre- 

 Glacial Europe, just at the moment before the temporary 

 extinction of his race in France by the coming on of the 

 Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the character 

 of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in 

 which species of cold and warm climates are at times 

 quite capriciously intermingled. We get the reindeer and 

 the mammoth side by side with the hippopotamus and the 



