The outlines of other animals, such as the stag, the great Irish elk with its huge palmated antlers, the ibex with its gracefully recurved horns, and the mammoth, have been met with in the caves of France, besides the bisons, seals, and birds already mentioned. In the figure of the mammoth the artist has seized the salient points with wonderful fidelity (Fig. 22); the spiral curvature of the tusks, the long hairy ears, and the long mane, which, had it not been for the discovery of the carcases preserved in the frozen morasses of Siberia, we should say were fictitious, because they are unlike those of any living species of elephant. In another example already mentioned (Fig. 80) the head of a charging elephant is most admirably engraved. The head of a brown bear is represented on a piece of antler from the cave of Bas-Massat, and on a fragment of schist from the same cave are the well-defined outlines of a species probably identical with the great cave-bear (Fig. 81). Sometimes the outlines of skins stretched out to dry are recognisable, and more rarely those of flowers and leaves (Fig. 91). The last occur in the caves of Belgium, France, and Switzerland. The human figure was but rarely sketched by the Cave-men, and that given in Fig. 77, in the hunting of the urus, is the most artistic as yet discovered.
Some of the vertical incised lines, and more especially those in the sketch on a piece of antler from the rock-shelter of Laugerie Basse, described by the Abbé Landesque,[1] may show that the inhabitants of Europe, in the late Pleistocene age, had their bodies more densely covered with hair than is usually the case at the present time. The protection from the cold which we and our
- ↑ Matériaux, 1874, p. 276.
