side of the Pyrenees, we have a picture of a group of women dancers who are not masked, but attired in the style of the hour.  They wear high hats or chignons, tight waists, and bell-shaped skirts.  Really, considering that we thus have a contemporary fashion-plate, so to say, whilst there are likewise the numerous stencilled hands elsewhere on view, and even, as I have seen with my own eyes at Niaux in the sandy floor, hardened over with stalagmite, the actual print of a foot, we are brought very near to our palaeolithic forerunners; though indefinite ages part them from us if we reckon by sheer time.

* * * * *

Before ending this chapter, I have still to make good a promise to say something about the neolithic men of western Europe.  These people often, though not always, polished their stone; the palaeolithic folk did not.  That is the distinguishing mark by which the world is pleased to go.  It would be fatal to forget, however, that, with this trifling difference, go many others which testify more clearly to the contrast between the older and newer types of culture.  Thus it has still to be proved that the palaeolithic races ever used pottery, or that they domesticated animals—­for instance, the fat ponies which they were so fond of eating; or that they planted crops.  All these things did the neolithic peoples sooner or later; so that it would not be strange if palaeolithic man withdrew in their favour, because he could not compete.  Pre-history is at present almost silent concerning the manner of his passing.  In a damp and draughty tunnel, however, called Mas d’Azil, in the south of France, where the river Arize still bores its way through a mountain, some palaeolithic folk seem to have lingered on in a sad state of decay.  The old sureness of touch in the matter of carving bone had left them.  Again, their painting was confined to the adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects, that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst something like them crops up again in the north of Scotland in what seems to be the early iron-age.  Had the rest of the palaeolithic men already followed the reindeer and other arctic animals towards the north-east?  Or did the neolithic invasion, which came from the south, wipe out the lot?  Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may some of us have a little dose of palaeolithic blood, as we certainly have a large dose of neolithic?  To all these questions it can only be replied that we do not yet know.

No more do we know half as much as we should like about fifty things relating to the small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with a language that has possibly left traces in the modern Basque, who spread over the west till they reached Great Britain—­it probably was an island by this time—­and erected the well-known long barrows and other monuments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; though not the round barrows, which are the work of a subsequent