The nearest type which we can now conceive of to the Drift-Folk of Europe’s post-glacial era is the Esquimaux. It is even possible that, like them, they may have occupied winter snow-huts; and only retreated to their cave-dwellings during the brief heat of a semi-arctic summer. Among a people so situated the industrial arts are called into utmost requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and the simplest experience of the hunter directs him to the produce of the chase for the most easy supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnishes the ready-made dagger, lance-head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the larger rodents supplies a more delicately edged chisel than primitive art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the larger mammalia in order to obtain the prized marrow, produces the splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converts into bodkins, hair-pins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or elephant is more readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less liable to fracture, than the intractable flint or stone; and all those materials are abundant in the most rigorous winters, when flint and stone are sealed up under the frozen soil. Tools and weapons of bone and ivory may therefore be assumed to have preceded all but the rudest stone implements; and although, owing to the indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our ideas of earliest post-glacial art are chiefly derived, enough has been found in contemporary cave-deposits to confirm this inference from the analogous hyperborean arts of our own day.