With the advent of man antedated in geological eras, the Roman period becomes, in truth, a part of very modern history; and the vast ages computed to have intervened between the two periods baffle the fancy in its efforts to comprehend the links by which they are connected. But crude as are the arts of that primeval age, it will be seen that they compare favourably with those of uncultured man at any later period. Recent explorations, and especially those of the Dordogne caves of Central France, disclose carvings in bone, and engravings on ivory and slate, hereafter referred to, revealing an imitative skill, and powers of observation in the delineation of characteristic details of form and action, such as have rarely, if ever, been equalled in the art of modern uncultured races. If by the aid of those singularly interesting disclosures, we do indeed recover traces of the Flint-Folk belonging to an era estimated by some scientific chronologists as antedating our own by hundreds of thousands of years, it is of no slight importance to perceive that the interval which has wrought such revolutions on the earth as are recorded in the mammaliferous drift, show man the same reasoning, tentative, and inventive mechanician, as clearly distinguished then from the highest orders of contemporary life of the Elephantine or cave periods, as he is now from the most intelligent of the brute creation. In truth, so far from arriving by such disclosures any nearer an anthropoid link between man and the brute, the oldest art-traces of the palæotechnic men of Central France not only surpass those of many savage races, but they indicate an intellectual aptitude in no degree inferior to the average Frenchman of the nineteenth century.