Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885Various
History
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, May 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
immediate descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were
driven out of Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the
enormous ice sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was
somewhere about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with
Mr. Andrew Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century,
that
He lived in the long long agoes;
’Twas the manner of primitive man.
The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just
at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by
the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the
character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which
species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously
intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with
the hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the
Norway lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits
with the lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact
is, as Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a
zoologically impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest,
and most remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was
in all probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding.
Our Zoo can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion
has gone the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal
ruminants of the Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of
Seine. But our old master saw the last of some at least among those
gigantic quadrupeds; it was his hand or that of one among his fellows
that scratched the famous mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine
and carved the figure of the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn
ornaments of Laugerie Basse. Probably, therefore, he lived in the
period immediately preceding the Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one
of the warm interglacial spells with which the long secular winter
of the northern hemisphere was then from time to time agreeably
diversified.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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