Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of ScienceAllen, Grant
Science
Falling in Love; With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science
Allen, Grant
Science
the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his 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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