Taking, then, this race as we find it, without speculating upon its immediate origin or future, we may endeavour to gather some notion of man’s way of life in these primitive times. It was of the simplest. We may well suppose, for some proofs to the contrary would otherwise most likely have been discovered, that his life was that of the hunter, which is, it has been said, generally the earliest phase of human society, and that he had not yet learned to till the ground, or to keep domestic animals for his use. No bones of animals like the sheep or dog are found among palæolithic remains, and therefore it seems probable that palæolithic man had not yet entered upon the next and higher phase, the pastoral life. He had probably no fixed home, no idea of nationality, scarcely any of obligations beyond the circle of his own family, in that larger sense in which the word ‘family’ is generally understood by savages. Some sort of family or tribe no doubt held together, were it only for the sake of protecting themselves against the attacks of their neighbours. For the rest, their time was spent, as the time of other savages is spent, out of doors in fighting and hunting, within doors in preserving their food and their skins, in elaborately manufacturing their implements of stone and bone. In the inclement seasons they were crowded together in their caves, perhaps for months together, as the Eskimo are in winter, almost without moving. As appears from the remains in the caves, they were in the habit at such times of throwing the old bones and the offal of their food into any corner (the Eskimo do so to this day), without taking the smallest trouble to obviate the unpleasant effects produced by the decay of all this animal matter in an atmosphere naturally close. Through the long winter nights they found time to perfect their skill in those wonderful bone carvings, and to lay up a store of weapons which they afterwards--anticipating the rise of commerce--exchanged with the inhabitants of some other cave for _their_ peculiar manufacture; for in one of the caves of the Dordogne we find the remains of what must have been a regular manufactory of one sort of flint-knife or lance-head, almost to the exclusion of any other of the ordinary weapons, while another cave seems to have been devoted as exclusively to the production of implements of bone. Man had no doubt a hard life, not only to obtain the food he needed, but to defend himself against the attacks of many wild animals by whom he was surrounded, animals whose particular species have in many cases become extinct, and whose classes have long ceased to inhabit Europe. Such are the cave lion, cave bear, cave hyæna, brown bear, grizzly bear, mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, urus, bison, and such rarities (with us) as the reindeer, the Irish elk, and the beaver.