CAVE MEN^S CHAMBER MUSIC 15 



martial airs far in advance, as music, of any per- 

 formance on the bones I have ever listened to, and 

 while the teeth were grinding, rattling and crashing 

 together, the lips were rapidly moving to soften, 

 deaden and louden the sounds. It was an astonishing 

 kind of music, but not agreeable to me on account of 

 an apprehension I felt that at any loud crash or 

 finale the teeth would fly into pieces all over the 

 room like two china vases brought violently into 

 collision. 



We know that the earliest man who has left traces 

 of his life and mind in the holes he inhabited was 

 an artist, that with rock and bone to work on he was 

 able to express the sense of beauty and wonder in 

 him, and to leave pictures of the wild life of his day — ■ 

 deer and mastodon and wild horse in flight — which 

 move the admiration of the ameliorated man of over 

 a hundred centuries later. Doubtless he had his 

 music too, his composers, and " instruments of un- 

 remembered forms,^' and it is highly probable that, 

 like my friend the Basque, he used his large powerful 

 teeth and the teeth-gnashing faculty in his winter 

 evening concerts, when the family sat round the fire 

 in Wookey Hole or Kent Cave or King Arthur's 

 Cave, and other rocky dens where they had their 

 homes and hearths. 



I have never come across anyone with a free or 

 movable ear, but I once met a man who, when con- 

 versing with another person sitting by him or walking 

 in the street, would always draw down the upper part 

 of the ear on the other side of the head, and hitch the 



