president's address. 13 



indeed, if we compare those products of the modern cai'ver's art that 

 have most analogy with the horn and bone carvings of the Cave 

 Men and rise at times to great excellence — as we see them, for instance, 

 in Switzerland or Norway — they are often the work of races of very 

 different physical types. The negroid contributions, at least in the 

 Southern zone of this Late Quaternary field, must not be under- 

 estimated. The early steatopygous images — such as some of these 

 of the Balzi Eossi caves — may safely be regarded as due to this ethnic 

 type, which is also pictorially represented in some of the Spanish rock- 

 paintings. 



The nascent flame of primeval culture was thus already kindled 

 in that Older World, and, so far as our present knowledge goes, it was 

 in the South- Western part of our Continent, on either side of the 

 Pyrenees, that it shone its brightest. After the great strides in humap 

 progress already made at that remote epoch, it is hard, indeed, to under 

 stand what it was that still delayed the rise of European civilisation in 

 its higher shape. Yet it had to wait for its fulfilment through many 

 millennia. The gathering shadows thickened and the darkness of a 

 long night fell not on that favoured region alone, but throughout the 

 wide area where Eeindeer Man had ranged. Still the question rises — 

 as yet imperfectly answered — were there no relay runners to pass on 

 elsewhere the lighted torch. ? 



Something, indeed, has been recently done towards bridging over the 

 ' hiatus ' that formerly separated the Neolithic from the Palaeolithic 

 Age — the yawning gulf between two Worlds of human existence. The 

 Azilian — a later decadent outgrowth of the preceding culture — which 

 is now seen partially to fill the lacuna, seems to be in some respects 

 an impoverished survival of the Aurignacian.* The existence of this 

 phase was first established by the long and patient investigations of 

 Piette in the stratified deposits of the Cave of Mas d'Azil in the Ariege, 

 from which it derives its name, and it has been proved by recent dis- 

 coveries to have had a wide extension. It affords evidence of a milder 

 and moister climate — well illustrated by the abundance of the little wood 

 snail (helix nemoralis) and the increasing tendency of the Eeindeer to die 

 out in the Southern parts of the area, so that in the fabric of the 

 characteristic harpoons deer-horns are used as substitutes. Artistic 

 designs now fail us, but the polychrome technique of the preceding Age 

 still survives in certain schematic and geometric figures, and in curious 

 coloured signs on pebbles. These last first came to light in the Cave of 

 Mas d'Azil, but they have now been found to recur much further afield 

 in a similar association in grottoes from the neighbourhood of Basel to 

 that of Salamanca. So like letters are some of these signs that the lively 



"Breuil, Congr. Prelnst. Geneva, 1912, p. 216 



