38o 



SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



separate these works from those of the ordinary savage 

 of modern times, and have caused living artists of 

 authority to declare that these craftsmen had those 

 definite gifts which entitle them to be recognised as 

 brother artists an assurance which confirms my own 

 impression based on a long study of large series of the 

 actual specimens. The best works of their later period 

 (for their skill took time to 

 develop, and follows the laws 

 of growth of all art) represent 

 animals, such as deer, in move- 

 ment and often turning round 

 or foreshortened (Fig. 70); some 

 of their carvings of horses' 

 heads are worthy of the Par- 

 thenon (Fig. 9). On the other 

 hand, as is often observed in 

 primitive art, their representa- 

 tions of the human face and 

 figure are very inferior, and tend 

 to caricature. 



FIG. 69. A piece of mammoth We are now in the Palaeo- 



ivory carved with spirals and Hthic period, and, what is more, 



scrolls from the cave of Arudy h . d wh j ^ 



(Hautes Pyrenees). Same size 



as the object. call the recent or modern epoch, 



and have entered on "geologic" 



times; this is the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is a 

 legitimate and useful thing thus to draw a strong line 

 between the Neolithic and the Palaeolithic portions of the 

 Stone Age. The Neolithic men belong, so to speak, to 

 our own days. They were, even seven thousand years 

 ago, only a little rougher in their tools than were the 

 peasants of the remoter parts of Central Europe a few 

 hundred years ago. They had not even as much ten- 

 dency to or gift for artistic work as the ploughmen of 



