PROGRESS AND POSITION OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL SCIENCES. 625 



a stage of more or less length during which he used any stick or stone 

 that came to his hands without attempting to fashion the one or the 

 other. Before he acquired the art of fashioning so elaborate an instru- 

 ment as the ordinary palaeolithic ax or hammer, there must have been 

 other stages in which he would have been content with such an improve- 

 ment on the natural block of flint as a single fracture would produce, 

 and would proceed to two or three or more fractures by degrees. It 

 must have been long before he could have acquired the eye for symme- 

 try and the sense of design, of adaptation of means to ends, which are 

 expressed in the fashioning of a complete palaeolithic implement. It is 

 probable that such rude implements as he would construct in this inter- 

 val would be in general hardly distinguishable from flints naturally 

 fractured. Hence the uncertainty that attaches to such discoveries of 

 the kind as have hitherto been made public. Prof. McKenny Hughes, 

 who speaks with very high authority, concludes a masterly paper in 

 the Archaeological Journal with the statement that he has " never yet 

 seen any evidence which would justify the inference that any implements 

 older than palaeolithic have yet been found." The name " palseotalith," 

 which had been suggested for prepalseolithic implements, seems to him 

 unnecessary at present, as there is nothing to which it can be applied; 

 and as it will be long before it can be asserted that we have discovered 

 the very earliest traces of man, he thinks it will probably be long 

 before the word is wanted. An elaborate work on the ruder forms of 

 implement, just published by M. A. Thieullen, of Paris, who has for 

 many years been engaged in collecting these objects, adds materially 

 to our knowledge of the subject. 



Another line of argument bearing strongly in the same direction is 

 afforded by the discovery in various places of works of art fabricated 

 by early man. The statuettes from Brassernpouy, the sculptures repre- 

 senting animals from the Bruniquel, the well-known figure of the mam- 

 moth engraved on a piece of ivory from Perigord, and many other 

 specimens of early art attest a facility that it is not possible to associ- 

 ate with the dawn of human intelligence. M. Salomon Beinach tells an 

 amusing story. A statuette in steatite of a woman, resembling in some 

 respects those of Brassernpouy, was discovered in one of the caverns 

 of Mentone, as far back as 1884, but when the discoverer showed it to 

 a personage in the locality, that authority advised him not to let it be 

 seen, lest it should take away from the belief in the antiquity of the 

 caves, it being then thought too artistic to be consistent with early man. 

 The finder acted on this advice, in ignorance of the real interest of the 

 statuette, until April, 1896, when he showed it to M. Beinach and M. Vil- 

 lenoisy, who promptly interviewed the sage adviser in question, and 

 obtained a confirmation of the statement. Some interesting additions 

 to our gallery of prehistoric art have been recently made by M. Emile 

 Biviere and M. Berthoumeyrou, at Cro-Magnon, in the Dordogne. These 

 are a drawing of a bison and another of a human female in profile, 

 SM 98 40 



