This contrast is too great and too constant to be accidental. It must be the result of a cause arising perhaps from some superstitious idea similar to certain modern superstitions. When Catlin had finished his first portrait of the Red-Skin, some of the tribe looked upon him as a dangerous sorcerer, who had robbed the model of part of himself. Perhaps some similar idea may have prevented the artists of the Vézère from studying the human figure, for it always happens that when they attempt to reproduce it their graving tool hesitates, and loses all its good qualities. These imperfect representations, therefore, tell us nothing of the appearance or proportions of the race. The most we can say, if we accept the interpretations of MM. l’Abbé Landesque and Piette, is that it was remarkably hairy. But this opinion, which rests chiefly upon the drawing of the _reindeer woman_, seems to me to be contradicted by that of the _aurochs man_, whose small pointed beard scarcely extends as far as the angle of the jaw-bone. The horizontal hatching upon the legs and body cannot, it appears to me, be taken for hairs, because it crosses at right angles the direction which would have been taken by the latter. I should much rather consider them as lines of painting, a kind of decoration which we know to have been held in high estimation amongst these tribes. VII. However bad they may be, the drawings which I have just described furnish us, nevertheless, with some facts respecting the mode of life pursued by these hunters. That of the _aurochs man_ informs us that they followed the largest game naked, as is often the case with the Red-Skins, their hair raised in a tuft on the top of the head, and armed only with the lance or javelin. The _whale man_ is also naked, and the immense arm which he stretches out as far as the fin of the fish, seems to indicate that he has fought and conquered this monster, which had doubtless run aground in some shallow. But, from this fact alone, it follows that the quaternary man of Périgord must sometimes have left his mountains and travelled as far as the sea-shore. His contemporaries in the Pyrenees did the same, as is proved by the drawings of seals discovered in the grottoes of Gourdan and Duruthy.