inward physiological condition peculiar to them, which has enabled them to resist disease or to eat certain kinds of food, or possibly to develop great mental acuteness, and so has led to the establishment of these peculiar small people as a race, without their smallness itself having anything to do with their selection and preservation. In that case smallness would be a "by-product," a "correlated" character, not the "effective life-saving" character. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 8: "Science from an Easy Chair," Methuen, 1909.] CHAPTER XVI PREHISTORIC PETTICOATS After the last great extension of glaciers in Europe, during which nearly all of Great Britain and the North of France and Germany were buried with Scandinavia under one great ice-sheet--and when this ice-sheet had receded, and the climate was like that of the Russian "steppes," cold and dry--there were men inhabiting the caverns on both sides of the Pyrenees. The tract of land which we call "Great Britain" was a part of the Continent of Europe. There was no "English Channel." The Thames and the Rhine opened by a common mouth into the North Sea. The mammoth and the hairy rhinoceros still lingered on in France and the more central regions of Europe. Wild horses, the great ox (Aurochs), the bison, ibex, chamois, were abundant, and the thick-nosed Saiga antelope, now confined to the Russian and Asiatic steppes, was present. The most abundant and important animal immediately north of the Pyrenees was the reindeer. The cave-men of France and Central Europe were a fine race--living by the chase, and fabricating flint knives and scrapers, fine bone spearheads and harpoons, as well as occupying themselves in carving ivory and reindeer antlers, so as to produce highly artistic representations of the animals around them. They rarely attempted the human face or figure, and when they did were not so successful as in their animal work. They also painted on the walls of some of their caverns, with red and yellow ochre, carbon, and white chalk representations--usually about one-third the size of nature--of some of the most important animals of the chase. They must have used lamps, fed with animal fat, to illuminate the walls, both when they were at work on the pictures and also afterwards, when they exhibited the finished pictures to the less gifted members of the tribe, as wonderful, even magical appearances. It is uncertain to what extent races of men succeeded one another or were cotemporaries in this period in Europe, but there is good reason for attributing the cave pictures to an early occupation of the caves by men who also carved, in ivory and stone, small figures of women resembling the Hottentot Venus--whilst the later occupants made no such statuettes, but carved in relief on bone or engraved it.