Throughout the floors of various caves in this district which have been rich in disclosures of primitive art, particles of charcoal abound at every level where broken bones occur, suggesting that fires were in daily use, and were employed for cooking much more than for warmth. Possibly, indeed, those caverns were only the summer dwellings of the Drift-Folk of post-glacial times; and with them, as with the Esquimaux, and the Indians of North America generally, fire may have been valued as a protection against the noxious insects which, especially in the brief summer of a rigorous climate, render life intolerable. Fire is the universal servant of man. The Esquimaux and the Red Indian ward off the mosquito, the black-fly, and the sand-fly by means of a “smudge” made with the smoke of grass and green-wood; while the Hottentot or Bushman kindles his night-fire in the tropics as the most effectual guardian against beasts of prey. Everywhere, and at all epochs, fire appears as one of the most characteristic indices of rational man; and as we study such traces of him as reappear for us in the works of art and the extinguished fires of the Moustier and Madelaine cave-dwellings, or those of the neolithic, if not an earlier period of the Aurignac catacomb, we see the unmistakable evidences of human intelligence; and anew concur in the decision of Columbus, that the night-torch of the Guanahanè savage was indisputable proof that the unknown world which lay before him was the habitation of man. It may be doubted if man has anywhere existed without the knowledge of fire. By means of it some of his earliest triumphs over nature have been achieved. With its aid his range is no longer limited to latitudes where the spontaneous fruits of the earth abound at every season. The use of fire lies at the root of all the industrial arts. The friendly savages found by Columbus on the first-discovered island of the New World were armed with wooden lances, hardened at the end by its means. The most civilised among the nations conquered by Cortes and Pizarro, had learned by the same means to smelt the ores of the Andes, and make of their metallic alloys the tools with which to quarry and hew the rocks, to sculpture the statues of the gods of Anahuac, and the palaces and temples of the Peruvian children of the sun. Without fire the imperfect implements of the stone period would be altogether inadequate to man’s necessities. By its help he fells the lofty trees, against which his unaided stone hatchet would be powerless. It plays a no less important part in preparing the log-canoe of the savage, than in propelling the wonderful steamship, by means of which the great lakes and rivers of the New World have become the highways of migrating nations.