A VERY OLD MASTER 113 



hyena ; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway 

 lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same 

 deposits with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the 

 rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr. Alfred Eussel Wallace 

 has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically im- 

 poverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and 

 most remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. 

 And it was in all probability the coming on of the Ice Age 

 that did the weeding. Our Zoo can boast no mammoth 

 and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone the 

 way of all flesh ; the deinotherium and the colossal rumi- 

 nants of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks 

 of Seine. But our old master saw the last of some at least 

 among those gigantic quadrupeds ; it was his hand or that 

 of one among his fellows that scratched the famous 

 mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and 

 carved the figure of the extinct cave bear on the reindeer- 

 horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse. Probably, therefore, 

 he lived in the period immediately preceding the Great Ice 

 Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells 

 with which the long secular winter of the northern 

 hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably diversi- 

 fied. 



And what did the old master himself look like ? Well, 

 painters have always been fond of reproducing their own 

 lineaments. Have we not the familiar young Eaffael, 

 painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the Titian, 

 and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, 

 all flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man 

 has drawn himself many times over, not indeed on this 

 particular piece of reindeer horn, but on several other 

 media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good 

 copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the 

 old cave at Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massenat, where a 



