the skilled metallurgists and architects of Central America and Peru. This development of a feeling for art in savage races is at all times interesting as indicative of intellectual capacity and powers of observation, even when manifested, as it frequently is, within a very narrow range. It is by no means a general characteristic either of savage or civilised man. Yet recent archæological discoveries prove it to have been one of the earliest forms of intellectual activity among the cave-dwellers of Europe’s palæolithic dawn. The most civilised nations have differed widely in the manifestations of this æsthetic faculty. The city of Dante was the Athens of the Middle Ages in art as well as letters; while the land which gave birth to Shakespeare can scarcely be said to have had a native school of painting or sculpture till late in the eighteenth century. The like differences are observable among barbarous nations. Races are met with, to whom the drawing of a familiar object suggests no idea of the original; while others, in nearly the same stage of savage life, habitually practise the representation of natural objects in the decorative details of their implements and articles of dress, and in the carvings which furnish occupation for many leisure hours. A special interest attaches to the disclosures of archæology relative to the prehistoric races of Europe, owing to the evidence thereby furnished of striking resemblances in their arts and conditions of life to those of uncultured races of our own day. In many respects it seems as though the present condition of some existing races of America only repeats that of Europe’s infancy. But so far as imitative art is concerned, the analogy fails when the more recent contents of the barrows, cairns, and grave mounds of prehistoric Europe are brought into comparison with those of the New World. If, indeed, we leave behind us the age of cromlechs, kistvaens, cairns, and barrows, and seek to estimate aright the disclosures of artistic ability pertaining to the far more ancient men of Europe’s Mammoth and Reindeer periods, it is otherwise. But, before reviewing the wonderfully definite glimpses thereby furnished of tribes of rude yet skilful hunters of that post-glacial world, it may be of some help, in the comparisons which they suggest, to recall impressions derived from a study of that Stone period in which the natives of the British Islands appear to have approximated, in many respects, to the Red Indian nomad of the American forest.