Other illustrations are given in order that the reader may compare them, and more especially those also just referred to above, with a woodcut (on preceding page) of drawings incised upon bone by Esquimaux of our own days. This has been chosen because there seems to be a general disposition, in the way of theory, to compare the dwellers in the caves of Dordogne and the men of the stone age with the Esquimaux, and to limit, as it were, the unknown amount of civilisation in the one by what we have learnt from our own experience of the latter. Yet, so far as the drawings and the sculptures are concerned, there is scarcely room for comparison. The work of the stone age is that of a people with whom, if they were in all other respects savages, we have no modern parallel. The work of the Esquimaux is that of men who imitate with the hand of a child, and the success or power of whose imitation ranges exactly with their advance and culture (if culture it may be called) in other arts. [Illustration] The first of these illustrations is perhaps the best, as it is certainly the most delicate and graceful of all the fragments yet discovered. It represents the profile of the head and shoulder of an ibex, carved in low relief upon a piece of the palm of a reindeer’s antler. So exact and well characterised is the sculpture, that naturalists have no hesitation in deciding the animal to be an ibex of the Alps, and not of the Pyrenees. The next is a group of reindeer drawn upon a piece of slate. And lower down the page, incised upon a piece of mammoth ivory, are outlines of the mammoth itself. The original, rather more than nine inches in length, is at Paris in the museum of the Jardin des plantes. [Illustration] [Illustration]