ridiculous ape, while men can go on civilising themselves, and growing richer and more comfortable, wiser and happier, year by year--how that comes to pass, I say, is to me a wonder and a prodigy and a miracle, stranger than all the most fantastic marvels you ever read in fairy tales. You may find the flint weapons which these old savages used buried in many a gravel-pit up and down France and the south of England; but you will find none here, for the gravel here was made (I am told) at the beginning of the ice-time, before the north of England sunk into the sea, and therefore long, long before men came into this land. But most of their remains are found in caves which water has eaten out of the limestone rocks, like that famous cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay. In it, and in many another cave, lie the bones of animals which the savages ate, and cracked to get the marrow out of them, mixed up with their flint-weapons and bone harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with round stones, used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked together into a hard paste or breccia by the lime. These are in the water, and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped from the roof above and hardened into stone. Of these caves and their beautiful wonders I must tell you another day. We must keep now to our fairy tale. But in these caves, no doubt, the savages lived; for not only have weapons been found in them, but actually drawings scratched (I suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth ivory--drawings of elk, and bull, and horse, and ibex--and one, which was found in France, of the great mammoth himself, the woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a lion's mane. So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember that. You like to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell. It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when he sat scratching on ivory in the cave the figures of the animals he hunted, was proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious human nature as you--that he was the kinsman of every painter and sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful works of God.