It would be jumping at conclusions to say that the conventional sign attached to or accompanying the pre-historic animal paintings of the caves were numbers. They may quite likely be ownership marks. It is a curious fact, which has recently been commented on, that these animal paintings are of domestic animals and if so the ownership marks themselves would be pictures of the marks actually branded upon the animals just as such marks are still branded on cattle on the plains and by New England farmers on their sheep. The fact that the tendency seems to be to regard the contents of these caves as religious, and the use of the caves as for religious purposes, suggests an analogy with votive offerings. If the marks are in fact numbers, the combination of figure and number suggests at once the innumerable lists of animals in the Babylonian temple records. Ownership marks themselves are, of course, not records of events but economic records and are very common before the use of phonetic writing. One very large class of these is the pottery mark which was first applied apparently by the man who made them for himself as an ownership mark and then, as one became more skilled in one thing and another and barter began, it passed into the trade-mark of manufacturers which has survived in the modern trade-mark system. It does not, of course, follow that the earliest documents were not also religious as well as business and political, or even religious as distinguished from the political. Actual evidence, so far as it goes, seems to point to trophy records and votive records,—and votive records of first fruits or other useful or valuable objects “laid up” are economic records, but the parallel evidence as to priest king, the evidence as to religious sanction for the protection of objects, the hypothesis of priestly guidance in the tribal meal for fair apportionment of spoils, etc., point to religious supervision of economic matters. In the savage state the rule is that when food is scanty the strong eat what they want and the weak starve—the rule of the wolf pack. The germ of all social order is perhaps the rule that the weak also shall share in limited food. Founded possibly in selfishness—the will to keep the weak alive for selfish reasons, it involves at least power of individual self-control, the considering of remoter ends and a certain social-consciousness. The right sharing of food supply requires a strong hand under savage conditions and every possible sanction of authority. It was quite natural therefore that the common meal “before God” which plays such a large part in primitive custom should grow up—and equally natural that it should be the symbol of peace. The priest, standing for God, divided the offering—no doubt in the beginning the whole food supply—and perhaps “kept” the natural relics of the feast in the way of skins and bones.