The second bridge of lintel-stones at Wycollar is a simple adaptation from one of Nature’s bridges, the bridge of stepping-stones littered over the beds of rivers by earthquakes and floods. When the stepping-stones are long you turn them on end and use them as piers; when they are short and squat you pile them up into piers; then lintel-stones are put from pier to pier, and from pier to each bankside. Here is the A B C of primitive bridge-making with slabs, boulders, and fragments of rock. It needs very much less mother-wit than that which enabled primitive men to survive innumerable hardships, and to breed and rear those true artists who in Palæolithic times, about 50,000 years ago,[16] turned a good many European caves into the first public art galleries, famous for their rock-paintings and for their sculpture and engravings. Thus the Altamira Cavern, near Santander, in Northern Spain, and the La Madeleine cave in the Dordogne (about eighty miles east of Bordeaux), are among the prehistoric museums, or art galleries, which have given us work very far in advance of the Wycollar lintel-bridges; so far, indeed, that trees and shrubs in the valley ought to blush with shame by keeping autumn tints in their leaves all the year round. This hint from Dame Nature might awaken some little self-reproach in the Lancashire weavers and peasants whose heavy clogs clatter day after day over the lintel-stones, wearing them into troughs where rainwater collects pretty pictures from the sky. [Illustration: IN THE VALLEY OF WYCOLLAR, LANCASHIRE: THE WEAVERS’ BRIDGE] Not long ago a busy official mind in the neighbourhood was troubled by one of the bridges at Wycollar, named the Weavers’ Bridge, a dull-witted primitivity made with three lintel-stones and two rough piers in the water. Though the busy official mind was troubled it did not suggest that the bridge should be put under glass and kept with as much care as the perfect skeleton of a mastodon would receive; nor did it wish to build a successor in the cheapest style of industrial metal-work. No; what the official mind advertised as a fortunate inspiration was a foolish little act of commonplace vandalism. It set a mason to chisel out of existence the trough worn in the lintel-stones by generations of clog-wearers! I have two photographs, now historic, in which the trough can be seen distinctly; but the poor weavers have no such consolation. Their ancestors’ work has to be done all over again, and they know that their great-grandchildren will find in the lintel-stones not a trough but a vague hollow scarcely deep enough to hold a few raindrops. Mr. Sargisson wrote to tell me this pathetic story of a crisis in antiquarianism. But it is fair to add that the busy official mind was content with one foolish act; it spared the rude pillar on the left bank, though this rough stone looks like a small menhir and completes the primeval bridge.