contemporaneously with the Reindeer, in France. 339 



Reindeer in France, we shall only mention that, out of seventeen 

 stations where we have ascertained the presence of that animal 

 in a state of subjection to the action of man, there is not one 

 in which we have observed traces of polishing upon the stone 

 weapons; nevertheless the worked flints have been collected 

 by thousands, in every variety of type, and passing through all 

 degrees of perfection of workmanship, from the roughly sketched 

 form of the haches from the diluvium of Abbeville and Saint- 

 Acheul, up to the lance-heads with numerous facets and with 

 elegantly undulated margins of the best time of the stone age 

 in Denmark. 



As to the epoch when the Reindeer ceased to inhabit what is 

 now temperate Europe, we have no positive historical or chrono- 

 logical data. The Reindeer was never seen or clearly described 

 by any author of antiquity. Caesar speaks of it only from hear- 

 say, and as an animal still existing somewhere in a forest, of 

 which the extreme limits were not reached even after a march of 

 sixty days. We have not recognized the Reindeer among the 

 animals figured upon the ancient coins of Gaul. Its bones have 

 not been found in the dolmens (tumuli) and other burying- 

 places regarded as Celtic, in which the remains of wild and 

 domestic animals are frequently associated, and in which we 

 have even twice observed bones of the beaver in the vicinity of 

 Paris. The Reindeer has not yet, so far as we know, been found 

 in the French turbaries ; nor have MM. Garrigou and Filhol 

 indicated its presence in certain caverns of the Ariege, which 

 they have justly assimilated, from their zoological characters and 

 also from the presence of instruments of polished stones, with 

 the most ancient lacustrine habitations of Switzerland. We 

 know that the Reindeer is still wanting to the fauna of these 

 lacustrine pile-works ; and yet we have been able to examine its 

 remains, derived from a neighbouring cave (that of Mont-Saleve), 

 in which the association of simply worked flints and of mammals 

 belonging to the same period occurs under the same conditions 

 as in our grottos of Perigord. 



Thus, whether the disappearance of the Reindeer from tem- 

 perate Europe be the result of a regional extinction of this spe- 

 cies, or of its expulsion by the progressive development of 

 human societies, or of its gradual and spontaneous retirement 

 in consequence of changes in climatic conditions, it is not the 

 less probable that this disappearance took place at a phase of 

 prehistoric time anterior to the introduction of the domestic 

 races and to the use of metals in western Europe. 



Ann. ^ Mag. N. Hist. Ser. 3. Vol.xm. 22 



