e large fires in and about the caves, both to cook their meat and
to keep off the wild beasts (lions, bears, and hyenas), who contended
with the strange, low-browed Neandermen for the use of the caves as
habitations.

On this side of the Pyrenees the Reindeer men have left some
wall-pictures, and new discoveries of great importance in the form of
rock carvings of human figures as well as pictures and huge figures of
horses, etc., are being made in France as I write these lines. But the
best preserved and most numerous wall pictures are those of the cave
of Altamira near Santander. These comprise some partially preserved
representations in yellow, red, white, and black of the great bison,
the wild boar, the horse, and other animals. A group representing some
twenty-five or more animals (each about one third the size of nature),
irregularly arranged, exists on a part of the roof, and others are
found in other parts of the cavern. Among the wall-pictures made by
ancient cave-men are numerous drawings of human beings in masks
representing animals' heads--probably indicating the "dressing-up" in
animal masks of priests or medicine men in the way in which we know
to-day is the custom among many savage tribes. Twenty-seven of these
"decorated" caverns were known in 1910--eleven in Spain, one in Italy,
and fifteen in South and Central France--and others are continually
being discovered. The most careful and critical examination by
scientific men leaves no doubt as to the vast antiquity of these
paintings, and as to their dating from a time when the animals painted
(including in some cases mammoth and rhinoceros, as well as bison,
reindeer, wild boar, ibex, red deer, bear, and felines) were existing
in the locality. The covering up of some of the drawings (which are
partly engraved and partly painted) by earthy deposits and by
encrustations of lime, and the presence in the cave deposits of the
worked flints and bones characteristic of the Reindeer men, leave no
doubt that these pictures are of that immense antiquity which we
express by the words "Quaternary period," "Upper Pleistocene" or
"Reindeer epoch."

It is, of course, only in accordance with what one would expect that
these pictures are of very varying degrees of artistic merit. But some
(a considerable number) are quite remarkable for their true artistic
quality. In this respect they differ from the rock paintings of modern
savage races--the Bushmen of South Africa, th