PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 9 



myself can never forget the impression produced on me as a privileged 

 spectator of a freshly uncovered interment in one of the Balzi Eossi 

 Caves — an impression subsequently confirmed by other experiences of 

 similar discoveries in these caves, which together first supplied the 

 concordant testimony of an elaborate cult of the dead on the part of 

 Aurignacian Man. Tall skeletons of the highly -developed Cro-Magnon 

 type lay beside or above their hearths, and protected by great stones 

 from roving beasts. Flint knives and bone javehns had been placed 

 within reach of their hands, chaplets and necklaces of sea-shells, fish- 

 vertebrse, and studs of carved bone had decked their persons. With 

 these had been set lumps of iron peroxide, the red stains of which 

 appeared on skulls and bones, so that they might make a fitting show 

 in the Under- world. 



' Colours, too, to paint his body, 

 Place within his hand. 

 That he glisten, bright and ruddy, 

 In the Spirit-Land ! ' ^ 

 Nor is it only in this cult of the departed that we trace the dawn 

 of religious practices in that older World. At Cogul we may now survey 

 the ritual dance of nine skirted women round a male Satyr-like figure 

 of short stature, while at Alpera a gowned sister ministrant holds up 

 ivhat has all the appearance of being a small idol. It can hardly be 

 doubted that the small female images of ivory, steatite, and crystalhne 

 talc from the same Aurignacian stratum as that of the Balzi Eossi 

 interments, in which great prominence is given to the organs of 

 maternity, had some fetichistic intention. So, too, many of the figures 

 of animals engraved and painted on the inmost vaults of the caves may 

 well have been due, as M. Salomon Eeinach has suggested, to the 

 magical ideas prompted by the desire to obtain a hold on the quarries 

 of the chase that supplied the means of livelihood. 



In a similar religious connexion may be taken the growth of a 

 whole family of signs, in some cases obviously derivatives of fuller 

 pictorial originals, but not infrequently simplified to such a degree that 

 they resemble or actually reproduce letters of the alphabet. Often they 

 occur in groups like regular inscriptions, and it is not surprising that 

 in some quarters they should have been regarded as evidence that the 

 art of writing had already been evolved by the men of the Eeindeer 

 Age. A symbolic value certainly is to be attributed to these signs, and 

 it must at least be admitted that by the close of the late Quaternary 

 Age considerable advance had been made in hieroglyphic expression. 



The evidences of more or less continuous civilised development 

 reaching its apogee about the close of the Magdalenian Period have been 



' Schiller, Nadowessier's Todtenlied. 



