Falling in Love

7. A Very Old Master

The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good

deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his

own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of

the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a

bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than

the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the

mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British

Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled

eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors

carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair,

just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of prim*** art was already

hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the

morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or

Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,

already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in

the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess

authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten

epochs--an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn't commit

one to any definite chronology in particular--then it is probable that

all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of

the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief

would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should

say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam

according to Ussher.

The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and

represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following one

another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air

suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite

unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse

and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their

manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and

spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the

domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing

the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is

little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the

whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly

remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the

prehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue

and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam

over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grass

and tall water-plants around the quays of Bordeaux and Lyons. Not only

do the bones of the contemporary horses, dug up in caves, prove this,

but quite recently the Russian traveller Prjevalsky (whose name is so

much easier to spell than to pronounce) has discovered a similar living

horse, which drags on an obscure existence somewhere in the high

table-lands of Central Asia. Prjevalsky's horse (you see, as I have only

to write the word, without uttering it, I don't mind how often or how

intrepidly I use it) is so singularly like the clumsy brutes that sat,

or rather stood, for their portraits to my old master that we can't do

better than begin by describing him _in propria persona_.

The horse family of the present day is divided, like most other

families, into two factions, which may be described for variety's sake

as those of the true horses and the donkeys, these latter including also

the zebras, quaggas, and various other unfamiliar creatures whose names,

in very choice Latin, are only known to the more diligent visitors at

the Sunday Zoo. Now everybody must have noticed that the chief broad

distinction between these two great groups consists in the feathering of

the tail. The domestic donkey, with his near congeners, the zebra and

co., have smooth short-haired tails, ending in a single bunch or

fly-whisk of long hairs collected together in a tufted bundle at the

extreme tip. The horse, on the other hand, besides having horny patches

or callosities on both fore and hind legs, while the donkeys have them

on the fore legs only, has a hairy tail, in which the long hairs are

almost equally distributed from top to bottom, thus giving it its

peculiarly bushy and brushy appearance. But Prjevalsky's horse, as one

would naturally expect from an early intermediate form, stands half-way

in this respect between the two groups, and acts the thankless part of a

family mediator; for it has most of its long tail-hairs collected in a

final flourish, like the donkey, but several of them spring from the

middle distance, as in the genuine Arab, though never from the very top,

thus showing an approach to the true horsey habit without actually

attaining that final pinnacle of equine glory. So far as one can make

out from the somewhat rude handicraft of my prehistoric Phidias the

horse of the quaternary epoch had much the same caudal peculiarity; his

tail was bushy, but only in the lower half. He was still in the

intermediate stage between horse and donkey, a natural mule still

struggling up aspiringly toward perfect horsehood. In all other matters

the two creatures--the cave man's horse and Prjevalsky's--closely agree.

Both display large heads, thick necks, coarse manes, and a general

disregard of 'points' which would strike disgust and dismay into the

stout breasts of Messrs. Tattersall. In fact over a T.Y.C. it may be

confidently asserted, in the pure Saxon of the sporting papers, that

Prjevalsky's and the cave man's lot wouldn't be in it. Nevertheless a

candid critic would be forced to admit that, in spite of clumsiness,

they both mean staying.

So much for the two sitters; now let us turn to the artist who sketched

them. Who was he, and when did he live? Well, his name, like that of

many other old masters, is quite unknown to us; but what does that

matter so long as his work itself lives and survives? Like the Comtists

he has managed to obtain objective immortality. The work, after all, is

for the most part all we ever have to go upon. 'I have my own theory

about the authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey,' said Lewis Carroll (of

'Alice in Wonderland') once in Christ Church common room: 'it is that

they weren't really written by Homer, but by another person of the same

name.' There you have the Iliad in a nutshell as regards the

authenticity of great works. All we know about the supposed Homer (if

anything) is that he was the reputed author of the two unapproachable

Greek epics; and all we know directly about my old master, viewed

personally, is that he once carved with a rude flint flake on a fragment

of reindeer horn these two clumsy prehistoric horses. Yet by putting two

and two together we can make, not four, as might be naturally expected,

but a fairly connected history of the old master himself and what Mr.

Herbert Spencer would no doubt playfully term 'his environment.'

The work of art was dug up from under the firm concreted floor of a cave

in the Dordogne. That cave was once inhabited by the nameless artist

himself, his wife, and family. It had been previously tenanted by

various other early families, as well as by bears, who seem to have

lived there in the intervals between the different human occupiers.

Probably the bears ejected the men, and the men in turn ejected the

bears, by the summary process of eating one another up. In any case the

freehold of the cave was at last settled upon our early French artist.

But the date of his occupancy is by no means recent; for since he lived

there the long cold spell known as the Great Ice Age, or Glacial Epoch,

has swept over the whole of Northern Europe, and swept before it the

shivering descendants of my poor prehistoric old master. Now, how long

ago was the Great Ice Age? As a rule, if you ask a geologist for a

definite date, you will find him very chary of giving you a distinct

answer. He knows that the chalk is older than the London clay, and the

oolite than the chalk, and the red marl than the oolite; and he knows

also that each of them took a very long time indeed to lay down, but

exactly how long he has no notion. If you say to him, 'Is it a million

years since the chalk was deposited?' he will answer, like the old lady

of Prague, whose ideas were excessively vague, 'Perhaps.' If you suggest

five millions, he will answer oracularly once more, 'Perhaps'; and if

you go on to twenty millions, 'Perhaps,' with a broad smile, is still

the only confession of faith that torture will wring out of him. But in

the matter of the Glacial Epoch, a comparatively late and almost

historical event, geologists have broken through their usual reserve on

this chronological question and condescended to give us a numerical

determination. And here is how Dr. Croll gets at it.

Every now and again, geological evidence goes to show us, a long cold

spell occurs in the northern or southern hemisphere. During these long

cold spells the ice cap at the poles increases largely, till it spreads

over a great part of what are now the temperate regions of the globe,

and makes ice a mere drug in the market as far south as Covent Garden or

the Halles at Paris. During the greatest extension of this ice sheet in

the last glacial epoch, in fact, all England except a small

south-western corner (about Torquay and Bournemouth) was completely

covered by one enormous mass of glaciers, as is still the case with

almost the whole of Greenland. The ice sheet, grinding slowly over the

hills and rocks, smoothed and polished and striated their surfaces in

many places till they resembled the _roches moutonn**_ similarly ground

down in our own day by the moving ice rivers of Chamouni and

Grindelwald. Now, since these great glaciations have occurred at various

intervals in the world's past history, they must depend upon some

frequently recurring cause. Such a cause, therefore, Dr. Croll began

ingeniously to hunt about for.

He found it at last in the eccentricity of the earth's orbit. This world

of ours, though usually steady enough in its movements, is at times

decidedly eccentric. Not that I mean to impute to our old and

exceedingly respectable planet any occasional aberrations of intellect,

or still less of morals (such as might be expected from Mars and Venus);

the word is here to be accepted strictly in its scientific or

Pickwickian sense as implying merely an irregularity of movement, a

slight wobbling out of the established path, a deviation from exact

circularity. Owing to a combination of astronomical revolutions, the

precession of the equinoxes and the motion of the aphelion (I am not

going to explain them here; the names alone will be quite sufficient for

most people; they will take the rest on trust)--owing to the

combination of these profoundly interesting causes, I say, there occur

certain periods in the world's life when for a very long time together

(10,500 years, to be quite precise) the northern hemisphere is warmer

than the southern, or _vice versa_. Now, Dr. Croll has calculated that

about 250,000 years ago this eccentricity of the earth's orbit was at

its highest, so that a cycle of recurring cold and warm epochs in either

hemisphere alternately then set in; and such cold spells it was that

produced the Great Ice Age in Northern Europe. They went on till about

80,000 years ago, when they stopped short for the present, leaving the

climate of Britain and the neighbouring continent with its existing

inconvenient Laodicean temperature. And, as there are good reasons for

believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before

the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate

descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of

Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice

sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere

about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew

Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that

He lived in the long long agoes;

'Twas the manner of primitive man.

The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just

at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by

the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the

character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which

species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously

intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the

hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway

lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the

lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr.

Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically

impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and most

remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was in all

probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding. Our Zoo

can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone

the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the

Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old

master saw the last of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds; it

was his hand or that of one among his fellows that scratched the famous

mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and carved the figure of

the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse.

Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the

Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells

with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was then

from time to time agreeably diversified.

And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have

always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the

familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the

Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all

flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many

times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on

several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good

copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at

Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Mass***, where a very early pre-Glacial man

is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting

a flint-tipped javelin. In this, as in all other pictures of the same

epoch, I regret to say that the ancient hunter is represented in the

costume of Adam before the fall. Our old master's studies, in fact, are

all in the nude. Primitive man was evidently unacquainted as yet with

the use of clothing, though primitive woman, while still unclad, had

already learnt how to heighten her natural charms by the simple addition

of a necklace and bracelets. Indeed, though dresses were still wholly

unknown, rouge was even then extremely fashionable among French ladies,

and lumps of the ruddle with which primitive woman made herself

beautiful for ever are now to be discovered in the corner of the cave

where she had her little prehistoric boudoir. To return to our hunter,

however, who for aught we know to the contrary may be our old master

himself in person, he is a rather crouching and semi-erect savage, with

an arched back, recalling somewhat that of the gorilla, a round head,

long neck, pointed beard, and weak, shambling, ill-developed legs. I

fear we must admit that pre-Glacial man cut, on the whole, a very sorry

and awkward figure.

Was he black? That we don't certainly know, but all analogy would lead

one to answer positively, Yes. White men seem, on the whole, to be a

very recent and novel improvement on the original evolutionary pattern.

At any rate he was distinctly hairy, like the Ainos, or aborigines of

Japan, in our own day, of whom Miss Isabella Bird has drawn so startling

and sensational a picture. Several of the pre-Glacial sketches show us

lank and gawky savages with the body covered with long scratches,

answering exactly to the scratches which represent the hanging hair of

the mammoth, and suggesting that man then still retained his old

original hairy covering. The few skulls and other fragments of

skeletons now preserved to us also indicate that our old master and his

contemporaries much resembled in shape and build the Australian black

fellows, though their foreheads were lower and more receding, while

their front teeth still projected in huge fangs, faintly recalling the

immense canines of the male gorilla. Quite apart from any theoretical

considerations as to our probable descent (or ascent) from Mr. Darwin's

hypothetical 'hairy arboreal quadrumanous ancestor,' whose existence may

or may not be really true, there can be no doubt that the actual

historical remains set before us pre-Glacial man as evidently

approaching in several important respects the higher monkeys.

It is interesting to note too that while the Men of the Time still

retained (to be frankly evolutionary) many traces of the old monkey-like

progenitor, the horses which our old master has so cleverly delineated

for us on his scrap of horn similarly retained many traces of the

earlier united horse-and-donkey ancestor. Professor Huxley has admirably

reconstructed for us the pedigree of the horse, beginning with a little

creature from the Eocene beds of New Mexico, with five toes to each hind

foot, and ending with the modern horse, whose hoof is now practically

reduced to a single and solid-nailed toe. Intermediate stages show us an

Upper Eocene animal as big as a fox, with four toes on his front feet

and three behind; a Miocene kind as big as a sheep, with only three toes

on the front foot, the two outer of which are smaller than the big

middle one; and finally a Pliocene form, as big as a donkey, with one

stout middle toe, the real hoof, flanked by two smaller ones, too short

by far to reach the ground. In our own horse these lateral toes have

become reduced to what are known by veterinaries as splint bones,

combined with the canon in a single solidly morticed piece. But in the

pre-Glacial horses the splint bones still generally remained quite

distinct, thus pointing back to the still earlier period when they

existed as two separate and independent side toes in the ancestral

quadruped. In a few cave specimens, however, the splints are found

united with the canons in a single piece, while conversely horses are

sometimes, though very rarely, born at the present day with three-toed

feet, exactly resembling those of their half-forgotten ancestor, the

Pliocene hipparion.

The reason why we know so much about the horses of the cave period is, I

am bound to admit, simply and solely because the man of the period ate

them. Hippophagy has always been popular in France; it was practised by

pre-Glacial man in the caves of P******, and revived with immense

enthusiasm by the gourmets of the Boulevards after the siege of Paris

and the hunger of the Commune. The cave men hunted and killed the wild

horse of their own times, and one of the best of their remaining works

of art represents a naked hunter attacking two horses, while a huge

snake winds itself unperceived behind close to his heel. In this rough

prehistoric sketch one seems to catch some faint antique foreshadowing

of the rude humour of the 'Petit Journal pour Rire.' Some arch************** believe that the horse was domesticated by the cave men as a source

of food, and argue that the familiarity with its form shown in the

drawings could only have been acquired by people who knew the animal in

its domesticated state; they declare that the cave man was obviously

horsey. But all the indications seem to me to show that tame animals

were quite unknown in the age of the cave men. The mammoth certainly was

never domesticated; yet there is a famous sketch of the huge beast upon

a piece of his own ivory, discovered in the cave of La Madelaine by

Messrs. Lartet and Christy, and engraved a hundred times in works on

arch*****, which forms one of the finest existing relics of pre-Glacial

art. In another sketch, less well known, but not unworthy of admiration,

the early artist has given us with a few rapid but admirable strokes his

own reminiscence of the effect produced upon him by the sudden onslaught

of the hairy brute, tusks erect and mouth wide open, a perfect glimpse

of elephantine fury. It forms a capital example of early impressionism,

respectfully recommended to the favourable attention of Mr. J.M.

Whistler.

The reindeer, however, formed the favourite food and favourite model of

the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the

mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these early

prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of pal******* art is

undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in

Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in

which the perspective of the two horns is better 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 P******, 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.

No, if we want to get at genuine, unadulterated primitive man we must go

much further back in time than the mere trifle of 250,000 years with

which Dr. Croll and the cosmic astronomers so generously provide us for

pre-Glacial humanity. We must turn away to the immeasurably earlier

fire-split flints which the Abb Bourgeois--undaunted mortal!--ventured

to discover among the Miocene strata of the _calcaire de Beauce_. Those

flints, if of human origin at all, were fashioned by some naked and

still more hairy creature who might fairly claim to be considered as

genuinely primitive. So rude are they that, though evidently artificial,

one distinguished arch******* will not admit they can be in any way

human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great

European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing

more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether

you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and

fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The

fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it.

When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to

manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man,

noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties--cannibal or

otherwise--is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. The

more we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the

conviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from being

primitive--that we must push back the early history of our race not for

250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years into

the dim past of Tertiary ages.

But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race by

a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is

separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space,

the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial

Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the

relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows still

cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheet

drove away pal******* man--the man of the caves and the unwrought flint

axes--from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked

savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed

only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of

taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing

of the use of metals--_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_--and he had

not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a

finished edge. He couldn't make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,

and, if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an

intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great

anthropological truth, justly remarks, 'man, being reasonable, _must_

get drunk'), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the

capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human

being who alone inhabited France and England during the later

pre-Glacial period.

A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put it),

and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile,

loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet

imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the

important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made

pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away

he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man,

physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations

of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how

hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age

of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity--the age

of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake

dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,

the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small

ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax

and wear decent clothing: in a word, they had passed from the savage

hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.

That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must

conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn't to be measured by mere

calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand

years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what

looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere

in the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail to get the

reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we

saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.

On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving from

the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this

essay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet,

produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,

and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of

the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and

it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of

prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now

serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, and

more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among

the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by

the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forest

two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry

cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody

knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a

bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets). Nay, I have

very little doubt in my own mind that with it some ******* ancestor has

brained and cut up for his use his next-door neighbour in the nearest

cavern, and then carved upon his well-picked bones an interesting sketch

of the entire performance. The Du Mauriers of that remote age, in fact,

habitually drew their society pictures upon the personal remains of the

mammoth or the man whom they wished to caricature in deathless

bone-cuts. The other paper-weight is a polished neolithic tomahawk,

belonging to the period of the mound-builders, who succeeded the Glacial

Epoch, and it measures the distance between the two levels of

civilisation with great accuracy. It is the military weapon of a trained

barbaric warrior as opposed to the universal implement and utensil of a

rude, solitary, savage hunter. Yet how curious it is that even in the

midst of this 'so-called nineteenth century,' which perpetually

proclaims itself an age of progress, men should still prefer to believe

themselves inferior to their original ancestors, instead of being

superior to them! The idea that man has risen is considered base,

degrading, and positively wicked; the idea that he has fallen is

considered to be immensely inspiring, ennobling, and beautiful. For

myself, I have somehow always preferred the boast of the Homeric Glaucus

that we indeed maintain ourselves to be much better men than ever were

our fathers.