As to the ingenious imitative art of the Cro-Magnon cave-dwellers, it is by no means peculiar to them and the modern Eskimo; but, on the contrary, is common to many savage races; though by no modern savage people has a like degree of artistic ability been shown. Professor Dawkins says truly of the cave-man: “He possessed a singular talent for representing the animals he hunted; and his sketches reveal to us that he had a capacity for seeing the beauty and grace of natural form not much inferior to that which is the result of long-continued civilisation in ourselves, and very much higher than that of his successors in Europe in the Neolithic age. The hunter who was both artist and sculptor, who reproduced, with his imperfect means, at one time foliage, at another the quiet repose of a reindeer feeding, has left behind him the proof of a decided advance in culture, such as might be expected to result from the long continuance of man on the earth in the hunter state of civilisation.”[44] All this is correct in reference to the art of the Vézère carvers and draughtsmen; but it would be gross exaggeration if applied to such conventional art as the Eskimo arrow-straightener which Professor Dawkins figures, with its formal row of reindeer and their grotesque accessories. The same criticism is equally applicable to numerous other specimens of Eskimo art, and to similar Innuit, or western Eskimo representations of hunting scenes, such as those figured by Mr. William H. Dall, in his _Alaska_, which he describes as “drawings analogous to those discovered in France in the caves of Dordogne.”[45] The identity, or near resemblance between harpoons, fowling spears, marrow spoons, and scrapers, of the ancient cave-race of pleistocene France, and implements of the modern Eskimo, is full of interest; as is much also of a like kind between savage races of our own day in the most widely severed regions of the globe; but it is a slender basis on which to found such far-reaching deductions. The old race that lived on the verge of the great glaciers in Southern France gave the preference to bone and ivory over flint or stone, because the climatic conditions under which they lived rendered those most accessible to them; and we see in the familiar types of flint arrow heads, stone hammers, and the like primitive tools of savage man, both in ancient and modern times, how naturally the workman, with the same materials and similar necessities, shapes his few and simple weapons and implements into like form. As to the absence of pottery, alike among the ancient cave-dwellers and the modern Eskimo, in which another element of resemblance is traced, it proves no more than that both had to work under climatic conditions which rendered clay, adequate fuel, and nearly all other appliances of the potter, even less available than flint and stone.