by blocks detached by the action of water. As soon as the entrances were closed they and their deposits were sealed up, until some of them were explored in recent times. Because what they contain has been thus preserved we are able to see a little more clearly

A CAVE-DWELLING OF THE STONE AGE (SECTION) From Cave, Mound, and Lake Dwellers," Holbrook (Heath) into the dim past of prehistoric man; we can trace in general an improvement in his craftsmanship; we find an occasional falling off; we perceive from the absence of certain things in the later deposits that had been common in the earlier that a change in conditions had taken place which was perhaps leading to the disappearance of Old Stone man before a new race and a new way of life.

Digging into the floor of a cavern that for a long

period served as a shelter for cave-man and for beast, we come upon quantities of the bones of the animals that haunted it, many of them gnawed by the cavehyena, bones of antelope, roe-deer, and other animals hunted for food, split by man to obtain the marrow, and some showing traces of fire, often the remains of hares in such great quantities that they must have formed the chief food of the men who found shelter

here. There is a patch of charcoal several yards square and many inches thick where they cooked it, and when the human occupation has been intermittent we find several hearthstones and layers of charcoal separated by beds of débris. In that case the implements found with the different charcoal layers will probably show an improvement in the skill with which they have been made. Often the hearthstones have formed resting-places for unburnt or partially burnt human bodies, after which probably the cavern was abandoned for a time, or finally when accumulations of refuse had raised the floor too near the roof for further habitation. In one case at least skeletons have been found only four feet from the rock overhead.

HAMMER-STONE

Old Stone man reached a high pitch of skill in the working of flint. There is immense advance shown from the roughly chipped tool, hardly to be verified for certain as the work of man, and the leaf-shaped point or point with shoulders which in proportion to size served as an arrow-head, lance-head, or knife. Flakes of flint were finely worked to serve as planes, or as instruments for scraping skins. Quartzite pebbles

with hollowed faces were possibly used as anvil-stones for flint working, or, some hold, as mortars for grinding colour--for cave-man was an artist as well as a hunter. Tools and weapons of bone followed those of flint, and are found along with them. The antlers of the reindeer especially were worked into spear-heads, sometimes with plain points, sometimes barbed like a harpoon, and with the base split to receive the shaft, or cut like a wedge to fix into it. Other bones perforated with

BONE NEEDLES

round holes were possibly whistles. The craftsmanship of Old Stone man is shown best of all in the bone needles he made for the sewing of skins, scraped and manipulated probably in Eskimo fashion, so that they remained soft. For these he took a splinter of bone which he rounded with a flint scraper. Then he rubbed it smooth and tapering with a sandstone burnisher, and lastly drilled an eye in it with a pointed flint.

From strings of teeth and periwinkle shells and medallions of bone and ivory we know that cavedwelling man, in the midst of an existence which was for ever that of hunting or being hunted, a perpetual struggle against hunger, cold, and enemies of all kinds, had already an eye to the adornment of life, that he took pleasure in hanging on himself and, we will hope, on his womankind necklaces of anything that he thought would add to personal attraction.

As developing intelligence made him more and more aware how precarious was his hold upon existence, and

set him speculating whether it was not some unseen hostile power that made his hunting fruitless and thinned the numbers of his tribe by agues and fevers, he began to look to brains more subtle than his own to devise plans for defeating his enemies and for bringing to naught, by the use of incantations and magic, the evils that threatened him. At any rate we sometimes find strange-looking sceptres,

formed of an antler pierced with circular holes, which may have been emblems of rule, or magicians' wands. They seem to indicate that already man was displaying the general human tendency to

CAVE-BEAR DRAWN ON A PEBBLE shift responsibility and

FOUND IN A CAVE IN FRANCE

From "Cave, Mound, and Lake
Dwellers," Holbrook (Heath)

to set up authority.

One great resource early stone man had

by which he could divert his mind from the pangs of hunger, or while away the days when hunting was impossible he was an artist-a sculptor, an engraver, an admirable draughtsman. The human figure and the animals he hunted-not as a rule those which he dreaded for their strength and ferocity-were the subjects he tried first to represent, and these he sculptured in the round on mammoth tusks, pebbles, bones, and pieces of reindeer antler. Hair and other details he put in with a flint graving-tool, and from this he soon came to engraving an outline on pieces of antler and scraping away the ground to throw it into low relief. Pure engraving on ivory and bone followed, the subjects being single

animals, or groups, sometimes hunting scenes. The human figure he seems consciously or unconsciously to have caricatured; animals he usually delineated with enviable spirit and sureness of touch. Among the animals, often extinct at the present day, that he portrayed are the mammoth, the urus (the great ox that Cæsar describes), the reindeer, ibex, horse, goat, and occasionally fish. The prehistoric artists varied naturally in skill, and an interesting contrast is afforded by two engravings on stone of oxen by different hands, the one masterly in execution and expression, the other with its scratched and uncertain outlines suggestive of a work of art produced in a modern nursery.

Recently there have been discovered at least twelve caves in France and Spain the walls of which have been decorated by prehistoric artists with representations of animals and men. These are sometimes engravings, sometimes paintings in black, brown, or red, the modelling of the figures well shown, and high lights scraped.

This early development in man's history of art of a high order is one of the wonders that the study of life abundantly provides. Cave-man's skill in depicting animals vanished, however, with him, and man of the New Stone Age, though a better craftsman, was a worse artist.