the large grinders.]

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 palæolithic 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 Solutré in the department of Saône-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 palæolithic 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.

Now let us take our lamps and explore the secrets of the interior. The icy torrents that hollowed it in the limestone have eaten away rounded alcoves along the sides. On the white surface of these, glazed over with a preserving film of stalactite, we at once notice the outlines of many hands. Most of them left hands, showing that the Aurignacians tended to be right-handed, like ourselves, and dusted on the paint, black manganese or red ochre, between the outspread fingers in just way that we, too, would find convenient. Curiously enough, this practice of stencilling hands upon the walls of caves is in vogue amongst the Australian natives; though unfortunately, they keep the reason, if there is any deeper one than mere amusement, strictly to themselves. Like the Australians, again, and other rude peoples, these Aurignacians would appear to have been given to lopping off an occasional finger—from some religious motive, we may guess—to judge from the mutilated look of a good many of the handprints.

The use of paint is here limited to this class of wall-decoration. But a sharp flint makes an excellent graving tool; and the Aurignacian hunter is bent on reproducing by this means the forms of those game-animals about which he doubtless dreams night and day. His efforts in this direction, however, rather remind us of those of our infant-schools. Look at this bison. His snout is drawn sideways, but the horns branch out right and left as if in a full-face view. Again, our friend scamps details such as the legs. Sheer want of skill, we may suspect, leads him to construct what is more like the symbol of something thought than the portrait of something seen. And so we wander farther and farther into the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimens to our pre-historic menagerie, including the rare find of a bird that looks uncommonly like the penguin. Mind, by the way, that you do not fall into that round hole in the floor. It is enormously deep; and more than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom, amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place.

Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former glaciers. This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you half a mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not to mention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fat man, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in the vast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for his picture-gallery. This was a later stock, that had in the meantime learnt how to draw to perfection. Consider the bold black and white of that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing mane and tail, glossy barrel, and jolly snub-nosed face. It is four or five feet across, and not an inch of the work is out of scale. The same is true of nearly every one of the other fifty or more figures of game-animals. These artists could paint what they saw.

Yet they could paint up on the walls what they thought, too. There are likewise whole screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting for ever, to be interpreted. The dots and lines and pothooks clearly belong to a system of picture-writing. Can we make out their meaning at all? Once in a way, perhaps. Note these marks looking like two different kinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are Australian weapons not unlike them. To the left of them are a lot of dots in what look like patterns, amongst which we get twice over the scheme of one dot in the centre of a circle of others. Then, farther still to the left, comes the painted figure of a bison; or, to be more accurate, the front half is painted, the back being a piece of protruding rock that gives the effect of low relief. The bison is rearing back on its haunches, and there is a patch of red paint, like an open wound, just over the region of its heart. Let us try to read the riddle. It may well embody a charm that ran somewhat thus: "With these weapons, and by these encircling tactics, may we slay a fat bison, O ye powers of the dark!" Depend upon it, the men who went half a mile into the bowels of a mountain, to paint things up on the walls, did not do so merely for fun. This is a very eerie place, and I daresay most of us would not like to spend the night there alone; though I know a pre-historian who did. In Australia, as we shall see later on, rock-paintings of game-animals, not so lifelike as these of the old days, but symbolic almost beyond all recognizing, form part of solemn ceremonies whereby good hunting is held to be secured. Something of the sort, then, we may suppose, took place ages ago in the cave of Niaux. So, indeed, it was a cathedral after a fashion; and, having in mind the carven pillars of stalactite, the curving alcoves and side-chapels, the shining white walls, and the dim ceiling that held in scorn our powerful lamps, I venture to question whether man has ever lifted up his heart in a grander one.

Space would fail me if I now sought to carry you off to the cave of Altamira, near Santander, in the north-west of Spain. Here you might see at its best a still later style of rock-painting, which deserts mere