ion. 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.

[Fig. 10. Palaelithic art: 297.jpg]

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
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 weapons of bronze, the time which sufficed to
change the climate and fauna and flora of Western Europe, lie between us
and palaeolithic man. Yet in him we must recognise a skill more akin to
the spirit o