The same conditions as many parts of Northern Siberia still exhibit at the present day prevailed over the whole of Central Europe at the end of the Glacial Period and the beginning of the Postglacial Period. Here man lived on frozen ground on the borders of ice-fields with the reindeer and its companions, as he does to-day in Northern Asia, and here, too--as he does there to-day--he must have found the woolly-haired mammoth preserved by the cold in the ice and frozen ground. The Drift reindeer-men of Central Europe presumably searched for mammoth tusks just as much as the present reindeer-men in North Asia. The great field of mammoth carrion at Predmost was, therefore, a very powerful attraction, not only for the beasts of prey--chief among them wolves--but also for man. [Illustration: THE EARLIEST ART: MANKIND’S FIRST EFFORTS IN PICTURE-MAKING These illustrations are of engravings on stone and bone and scratchings on rocks made by prehistoric man, chiefly in France. The figures of the reindeer and those of the mammoth and the bison, the two latter found at Dordogne, are astonishingly good, and indicate genuine power of draughtsmanship at a remote period of human life. ] [Sidenote: Drift Man Compared with Modern Man] In France especially many primitive works of art of the “Ivory Epoch” have been found, and even the nude figure of woman is not wanting; but no proof is given that these carvings belong to the time when the mammoth still lived. Much sensation has been caused by an engraving on a piece of mammoth ivory representing a hairy mammoth with its mane and strongly-curved tusks. This illustration has been taken as unexceptionable proof that the artist of the Drift Period who did it saw and portrayed the mammoth alive. But could the mammoth hunter Schumachow--the Tunguse who, in 1799, discovered, in the ice of the peninsula of Tumys Bykow at the mouth of the Lena, the mammoth now erected in the collection at the St. Petersburg Academy [see page 123]--have pictured the animal otherwise when it was freshly melted out of the ice? And the Madelaine cave in the Périgord, where the piece of ivory with the picture of the mammoth was found, certainly belongs to the Reindeer Period. Had we not independent proofs that Drift Man lived in Central Europe--for instance, at Taubach--with the great extinct pachydermata, neither the finds in the “loess” near Predmost, nor the articles of ivory, nor the illustration of the mammoth itself, could prove it. They furnish absolute proof of the existence of Drift Man only back to the Reindeer Period. To decide whether a corpse frozen in the stone-ice belonged to a Drift Man, the examination of the corpse itself, its skull, bones, and soft parts, would no more suffice than clothing, implements, and ornament. For at least so much is confidently asserted by many palæontologists, that all the skulls and bones hitherto known to have been ascribed to Drift Man by the