To the credit of the Mousterians, however, must be set down the fact that they are associated with the habit of living in caves, and perhaps may even have started it; though some implements of the drift type occur in Le Moustier itself, as well as in other caves, such as the famous Kent’s Cavern near Torquay.  Climate, once more, has very possibly to answer for having thus driven man underground.  Anyway, whether because they must, or because they liked it, the Mousterians went on with their cave life during an immense space of time, making little progress; unless it were to learn gradually how to sharpen bones into implements.  But caves and bones alike were to play a far more striking part in the days immediately to follow.

The third and last main stage of the palaeolithic epoch developed by degrees into a golden age of art.  But I cannot dwell on all its glories.  I must pass by the beautiful work in flint; such as the thin blades of laurel-leaf pattern, fairly common in France but rare in England, belonging to the stage or type of culture known as the Solutrian (from Solutre in the department of Saone-et-Loire).  I must also pass by the exquisite French examples of the carvings or engravings of bone and ivory; a single engraving of a horse’s head, from the cave at Creswell Crags in Derbyshire, being all that England has to offer in this line.  Any good museum can show you specimens or models of these delightful objects; whereas the things about which I am going to speak must remain hidden away for ever where their makers left them—­I mean the paintings and engravings on the walls of the French and Spanish caves.

I invite you to accompany me in the spirit first of all to the cave of Gargas near Aventiron, under the shadow of the Pic du Midi in the High Pyrenees.  Half-way up a hill, in the midst of a wilderness of rocky fragments, the relics of the ice-age, is a smallish hole, down which we clamber into a spacious but low-roofed grotto, stretching back five hundred feet or so into infinite darkness.  Hard by the mouth, where the light of day freely enters, are the remains of a hearth, with bone-refuse and discarded implements mingling with the ashes to a considerable depth.  A glance at these implements, for instance the small flint scraper with narrow high back and perpendicular chipping along the sides, is enough to show that the men who once warmed their fingers here were of the so-called Aurignacian type (Aurignac in the department of Haute Garonne, in southern France), that is to say, lived somewhere about the dawn of the third stage of the palaeolithic epoch.  Directly after their disappearance nature would seem to have sealed up the cave again until our time, so that we can study them here all by themselves.