managed than a Chinese artist would manage it at the present day.  Another drawing of two reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and unearthed in one of the caves of Perigord, though far inferior to the Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit.  The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of another.  Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures.  Probably all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals.  To quote Mr. Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, ’he lived in a cave by the seas; he lived upon oysters and foes.’  The oysters are quite undoubted, and the foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.

I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather question-begging style and title of primitive man.  In reality, however, the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive.  You can’t speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial.  Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals; nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilised being who is now calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study.  Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable generations of gradually improving intermediate forms.  The old master, when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear’s teeth dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him.  Already he had invented the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head, the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger, and the needle.  Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the figures of animals.  I have no doubt that he even knew how to brew and to distil; and he was probably acquainted with the noble art of cookery as applied to the persons of his human fellow creatures.  Such a personage cannot reasonably be called primitive; cannibalism, as somebody has rightly remarked, is the first step on the road to civilisation.