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 Massenat, 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 nu