stinct than the
connection between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has
been hanged and success at cards--a common French superstition. The
Bushman cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black,
red, and white. Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and
like children, draw animals much better than the human figure. The
Bushman dog in our little engraving (Fig. 7) is all alive--almost as
full of life as the dog which accompanies the centaur Chiron, in that
beautiful vase in the British Museum which represents the fostering of
Achilles. The Bushman wall-paintings, like those of Australia, seem
to prove that savage art is capable of considerable freedom, when
supplied with fitting materials. Men seem to draw better when they
have pigments and a flat surface of rock to work upon, than when they
are scratching on hard wood with a sharp edge of a broken shell.
Though the thing has little to do with art, it may be worth
mentioning, as a matter of curiosity, that the labyrinthine Australian
caves are decorated, here and there, with the mark of a red hand. The
same mysterious, or at least unexplained, red hand is impressed on the
walls of the ruined palaces and temples of Yucatan--the work of a
vanished people.

[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Palaeolithic Art.]

[Illustration: Fig. 11.--Red Indian Art: the Thunder-bird.]

There is one singular fact in the history of savage art which reminds
us that savages, like civilised men, have various degrees of culture
and various artistic capacities. The oldest inhabitants of Europe who
have left any traces of their lives and handiwork must have been
savages. Their tools and weapons were not even formed of polished
stone, but of rough-hewn flint. The people who used tools of this sort
must necessarily have enjoyed but a scanty mechanical equipment, and
the life they lived in caves from which they had to drive the
cave-bear, and among snows where they stalked the reindeer and the
mammoth, must have been very rough. These earliest known Europeans,
'palaeolithic men,' as they are called, from their use of the ancient
unpolished stone weapons, appear to have inhabited the countries now
known as France and England, before the great Age of Ice. This makes
their date one of incalculable antiquity; they are removed from us by
a 'dark backward and abysm of time.' The whole Age of Ice, the
dateless period of the polishers of stone weapons, the arrival of men
using