f the
limestone rocks, like that famous cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay. In it,
and in many another cave, lie the bones of animals which the savages ate,
and cracked to get the marrow out of them, mixed up with their
flint-weapons and bone harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with
round stones, used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked
together into a hard paste or breccia by the lime. These are in the
water, and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped
from the roof above and hardened into stone. Of these caves and their
beautiful wonders I must tell you another day. We must keep now to our
fairy tale. But in these caves, no doubt, the savages lived; for not
only have weapons been found in them, but actually drawings scratched (I
suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth ivory--drawings of elk, and bull,
and horse, and ibex--and one, which was found in France, of the great
mammoth himself, the woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a
lion's mane. So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange
creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to
draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember that. You like
to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell. It is one
of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins,
dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when
he sat scratching on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he
hunted, was proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious
human nature as you--that he was the kinsman of every painter and
sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful works
of God.

Sometimes, again, especially in Denmark, these savages have left behind
upon the shore mounds of dirt, which are called there
"kjokken-moddings"--"kitchen-middens" as they would say in Scotland,
"kitchen-dirtheaps" as we should say here down South--and a very good
name for them that is; for they are made up of the shells of oysters,
cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, and other shore-shells besides, on
which those poor creatures fed; and mingled with them are broken bones of
beasts, and fishes, and birds, and flint knives, and axes, and sling
stones; and here and there hearths, on which they have cooked their meals
in some rough way. And that is nearly all we know about them; but this
we know from the size of certai