The Prehistoric Hunter. 



3i 



SPEAR-HEAD FOUND AT SAME PLACE AS AXE — FROM COLLECTION OF ALFRED M. MAYER. 



with the bones of the animals they slew, and whose flesh was 

 probably their only food. 



These gravel-beds, forming what is called river-drift, are of great 

 age. Lyell is of opinion that the chipped-flint implements and the 

 bones found in the drift of the river Somme, in France, are at least 

 one hundred thousand years old ; while others hold that two hundred 

 and fifty thousand years have elapsed since these ancient men hunted 

 with their rude arms such extinct animals as the great Irish elk, the 

 mammoth, the urus, and the cave bear. With their stone axes and 

 flint spears they brought down the noble game, and skinned and 

 cut it up with their flint knives. 



The gigantic Irish elk, which stood ten feet in height and carried 

 magnificent antlers which spread eleven feet from tip to tip ; the 

 urus, which disappeared in historic times, and which was described by- 

 Caesar as " nearly equal to the elephant in bulk, but in color, shape, 

 and kind resembling a bull"; the cave bear, longer than our grizzly; 

 the cave lion ; the hyena ; a woolly-haired rhinoceros ; a hippopota- 

 mus ; the mammoth; the aurochs, or bison; the musk-ox; the wild 

 horse ; these were the animals hunted by these most ancient of 

 prehistoric men. They have all passed away, except the aurochs, 

 which the Russian Government has saved from extermination by 

 strictly guarding them in the forests of Lithuania, and the musk- 

 ox, which, however, now lives in the arctic regions and is sel- 

 dom seen below the parallel of sixty-eight. The rest are only 

 known to us from their bones, except the mammoth, which has 



