“The conflict of man with the animal world,” says Wilhelm Bölsche, “has passed away unsung and uncelebrated. The civilised man of to-day has hardly a recollection of the endless lapse of time during which mankind had to struggle with the beasts of the earth for mastery.” Let us for a few moments turn our gaze backwards to that far past. In epochs that the learned date back by hundreds of thousands of years, we find attempts made by the cave-dwellers to execute artistic representations of nature as they saw it. The artist of prehistoric times set to work with his rude instruments to draw in merest outline on a smooth rock-face, on a tusk taken in the chase, or on some such material, the things that had particularly attracted his thoughts or stimulated his efforts. Specimens of these primitive works of art have been handed down to us. In the first place there are pictures of animals, scratched upon ivory, and notwithstanding all their crudeness, sketched with sufficient ability to enable us to-day to recognise with certainty the objects which the artist tried to depict. Such sketches scratched on ivory, showing various kinds of animals (some of them now extinct) and forming the oldest documents of the animal-sketcher’s art, have been found in the caves of the south-west of France, in the old dwelling-places of the so-called “Madeleine” hunters of La Madeleine and Laugerie Basse. The museum at Zurich also possesses similar primitive documents from the Kesslerloch cave, near Thaingen, in the canton of Schaffhausen. [Illustration: HOTTENTOT HUNTERS--A SKETCH DATING FROM 200 YEARS AGO. (Some South African tribes actually hunt the lion on foot with javelins, and I have myself more than once observed the courage of the East African natives in similar circumstances.)]