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 reindeer, however, formed the favourite food and favourite model of
the pre-Glacial artists. Perhaps it was a better sitter than the
mammoth; certainly it is much more frequently represented on these early
prehistoric bas-reliefs. The high-water mark of palaeolithic art is
undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in
Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in
which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a Chinese
artist would manage it at the present day. Another drawing of two
reindeer fighting, scratched on a fragment of schistose rock and
unearthed in one of the caves of Perigord, though far inferior to the
Swiss specimen in spirit and execution, is yet not without real merit.
The perspective, however, displays one marked infantile trait, for the
head and legs of one deer are seen distinctly through the body of
another. Cave bears, fish, musk sheep, foxes, and many other extinct or
existing animals are also found among the archaic sculptures. Probably
all these creatures were used as food; and it is even doubtful whether
the artistic troglodytes were not also confirmed cannibals. To quote Mr.
Andrew Lang once more on primitive man, 'he lived in a cave by the seas;
he lived upon oysters and foes.' The oysters are quite undoubted, and the
foes may be inferred with considerable certainty.
I have spoken of our old master more than once under this rather
question-begging style and title of primitive man. In reality, however,
the very facts which I have here been detailing serve themselves to show
how extremely far our hero was from being truly primitive. You can't
speak of a distinguished artist, who draws the portraits of extinct
animals with grace and accuracy, as in any proper sense primordial.
Grant that our good troglodytes were indeed light-hearted cannibals;
nevertheless they could design far better than the modern Esquimaux or
Polynesians, and carve far better than the civilised being who is now
calmly discoursing about their personal peculiarities in his own study.
Between the cave men of the pre-Glacial age and the hypothetical hairy
quadrumanous ancestor aforesaid there must have intervened innumerable
generations of gradually improving intermediate forms. The old master,
when he first makes his bow to us, naked and not ashamed, in his Swiss
or French grotto, flint scalpel in hand and necklet of bear's teeth
dropping loosely on his hairy bosom, is nevertheless in all essentials a
completely evolved human being, with a whole past of slowly acquired
culture lying dimly and mysteriously behind him. Already he had invented
the bow with its flint-tipped arrow, the neatly chipped javelin-head,
the bone harpoon, the barbed fish-hook, the axe, the lance, the dagger,
and the needle. Already he had learnt how to decorate his implements
with artistic skill, and to carve the handles of his knives with the
figures of animals.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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