ving relics in
the modern civilized world, and being replaced by the higher doctrine
that crime is an offence against society, to be repressed for the public
good. Another vast social change has been that from the patriarchal
condition, in which the unit is the family under the despotic rule of
its head, to the systems in which individuals make up a society whose
government is centralized in a chief or king. In the growth of
systematic civilization, the art of writing has had an influence so
intense, that of all tests to distinguish the barbaric from the
civilized state, none is so generally effective as this, whether they
have but the failing link with the past which mere memory furnishes, or
can have recourse to written records of past history and written
constitutions of present order. Lastly, still following the main lines
of human culture, the primitive germs of religious institutions have to
be traced in the childish faith and rude rites of savage life, and
thence followed in their expansion into the vast systems administered by
patriarchs and priests, henceforth taking under their charge the
precepts of morality, and enforcing them under divine sanction, while
also exercising in political life an authority beside or above the civil
law.

The state of culture reached by Quaternary man is evidenced by the stone
implements in the drift-gravels, and other relics of human art in the
cave deposits. His drawings on bone or tusk found in the caves show no
mean artistic power, as appears by the three specimens copied in the
Plate. That representing two deer (fig. 6) was found so early as 1852 in
the breccia of a limestone cave on the Charente, and its importance
recognized in a remarkable letter by Prosper Merimee, as at once
historically ancient and geologically modern (_Congres d'anthropologie
et d'archeologie prehistoriques_, Copenhagen (1869), p. 128). The other
two are the famous mammoth from the cave of La Madeleine, on which the
woolly mane and huge tusks of _Elephas primigenius_ are boldly drawn
(fig. 7); and the group of man and horses (fig. 8). There has been found
one other contemporary portrait of man, where a hunter is shown stalking
an aurochs.

That the men of the Quaternary period knew the savage art of producing
fire by friction, and roasted the flesh on which they mainly subsisted,
is proved by the fragments of charcoal found in the cave deposits, where
also occur bone awls and needles, which indicate