Amid all the remarkable evidence recently disclosed relative to the antiquity and the rude arts of primitive man, nothing has yet appeared suggestive of a condition inferior to the savages of Tierra del Fuego or Australia; while much tends to an opposite conclusion. Alike in physical development and in arts, the Troglodytes of the Dordogne caves were undoubtedly far in advance of either; and yet they were the contemporaries of the mammoth, the Siberian rhinoceros, the cave- lion and bear, the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, and the fossil horse of Central Europe,—the men of a period separated from our own by epochs the duration of which can be gauged by no standards of historical chronology. It could scarcely admit of doubt that such men were capable of achieving the art of fire-making. It might even be questioned if they could have subsisted under the conditions of life marking that post-glacial epoch without the use of fire. But on this subject we are not left to conjecture. The contents of the Aurignac cavern, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, at the foot of the Pyrenees, were at first supposed to disclose a singularly interesting example of sepulture contemporaneous with the fossil mammals of the drift; and accompanied not only with implements and personal ornaments fashioned from their bones and tusks, as well as others of flint; but with the ashes of the funeral fires and the débris of the funeral feast which formed a part of the last rites to the dead. Unfortunately some discredit has been cast on the evidence which seemed to indicate that the remains of extinct mammalia, and those of the entombed dead, were contemporaneous; and the importance of the deductions which this discovery seemed to justify render it all the more needful that the proof should be indisputable. But the practice of regular interment of the dead, accompanied with some funeral rites, by the men of the post-glacial age, is suggested by the contents of the sepulchral recess of Cro-Magnon, in the valley of the Vézère. No ashes of funeral fires can be pointed to, but the traces of the use of fire are abundant.