276 FOSSIL MEN. 



that it does not certainly prove, any more than the 

 figure of St. George and the dragon on an English 

 coin would show that the saint and the dragon sur- 

 vived to the times of the Georges. Such a totem 

 might, like the manatee carved on the pipes of the 

 Ohio mound-builders, refer to an animal of a distant 

 country, from which the owner or his ancestors had 

 migrated, or with which they had intercourse. It 

 might also be handed down as an heirloom for a 

 vast number of generations, and might pass from 

 tribe to tribe. Its actual last possessors might thus 

 never have seen the mammoth, though they must 

 have known it by tradition. Some of the Algonquin 

 tribes had a tradition of the mammoth or mastodon 

 as a great elk, with an arm projecting from its 

 shoulder, and the Micmacs represent the bones of 

 the mastodon as belonging to gigantic beavers which 

 their great hero, Glooscap, destroyed. The mammoth 

 was in any case the symbol of some pre-historic man 

 or tribe of France : and in the cave of Bruniquel we 

 find, along with beautiful fish-harpoons, figures carved 

 on implements, and representing the horse, ibex, snake, 

 reindeer, and salmon ; so that if we knew the language 

 of these people, we could decipher their names on their 

 implements. An American Indian could in any case 

 read them in his own tongue as pictographs, and 

 might also conjecture the facts indicated by some of 

 the significant marks and dots attached to them. 



Lyell well remarks that these carvings teach us that 

 the ancient tribes who hunted in the Dordogne, per- 



