502 The American Naturalist. [May, 
primitive man to look at art through his eyes, and to study it with his 
critical or æsthetic eye, as though the primitive works were to be sub- 
mitted to the committee for entrance into the great Salon of Paris: He 
declared this to be not scientific nor even sensible, but to be in the 
highest degree fantastic; that the sooner it was laid away, and the 
students and archeologists of to-day come down to common ground, 
and devote themselves to presentation of the actual facts, the better it 
would be for the science. He ridiculed the idea put forth by M. Piette 
that these artists of the paleolithic age made studies and executed: 
sketches of skeletons, whether of man or beast, for the same reason as 
do our modern artists,—that is, to study the anatomy and be better 
able to render correctly the form in the flesh. ‘‘ No,’’ said he, “the 
artist of Mas d’Azil copied the heads which may have been skinned or 
flayed, and the bare bones of the skull or skeleton which he may have 
had many times before his eyes.’’ 
M. Piette responded.’ He demanded the proofs that the domestica- 
tion of the reindeer was impossible without the dog. He declared his 
belief that the engravings of the woman and the reindeer constituted 
a true picture, of which we now unhappily have but part. The lines 
of the two subjects do not penetrate or interfere with each other ; the 
legs of the reindeer, as they cross the picture of the woman, are 
brusquely interrupted, while the lines depicting the woman continue 
across. It is the case of the one object being represented behind the 
other. 
Mr. John Evans said the interpretation of a few designs slightly 
obscure is not sufficient proof that the reindeer and other animals 
were domesticated. The dog would appear to have been the first 
animal domesticated, and this was in accordance with logic and reason. 
Monsieur Delgado made an elaborate, detailed, and interesting com- 
munication upon a series of prehistoric caverns found in Portugal. 
y had served as habitations and also as burial places. The objects 
of human industry were of worked flint, arrow, and spear-heads, flasks, 
pottery, polished stone hatchets, worked bones, ornaments, etc., ner 
spersed with weapons or toòls and ornaments of bronze. They were 
the same race apparently, so far as could be judged from the human 
remains, as had been found in the south of Portugal and Spain. The 
skull was dolichocephalic, and the tibia platycnemic. 3 
Question III. had a second part: ‘* The Value of Paleontologic 
and Archeologic Classifications as Applied to the Plistocene Period. 
Doctor Gosse, of Geneva, presented charts of Lake Geneva showing: 
the various deposits along its banks made during the Plistocene perio” 
