object-drawing and ideographic chronicling, from which hieroglyphic, demotic, and ultimately, phonetic writing were evolved. It is not solely by inference that we are led to surmise that the ingenious draughtsmen of Southern France had a higher aim than mere pastime in some, at least, of their graphic devices. The relics recovered from the ancient caves include what appear to be tallies and numerical records, unmistakably indicative, not only of a method of numeration, but of the growth of a system of mnemonic symbolism, and distinctive graven characters, not greatly inferior to the primitive alphabets of Celtic or Scandinavian lithology. It is curious, indeed, to find in use in Europe’s early Post-Glacial period symbols which, but for their undoubted execution by the ancient cave-men of Aquitania, might be assigned with every probability to some Druid scribe, familiar with the ogham characters of the Gauls and British Celts. Among the objects recovered from the Dordogne caves, including tallies and inscribed tablets of horn and ivory, with their enumeration in simple units, M. Broca specially noted a deer’s tyne, marked with a series of notches, which he assumed to be a hunter’s memoranda of the produce of the chase. A more complex record, found in the rock-shelter of Gorge d’Enfer, is inscribed on a plate of ivory. Its groups of horizontal and oblique lines along the edges, and symmetrical rows of dots on the flat surface, combine to furnish a record graven in characters as well-defined as many a runic or ogham inscription. If it be no more than the memoranda of a successful hunt, with a classification of the different kinds of game secured for distribution among the members of the tribe, it is not greatly inferior to the early system of numeration among the Egyptians. But when such a piece of arithmetic was supplemented by a pictorial record of the hunt; or by the incident, so acceptable to a bevy of hunters over their camp-fire, of the fight of the male deer in the rutting season; or the charge of the enraged elephant with elevated trunk, trumpeting wrath and defiance: much had been accomplished that admits of comparison with records of the modern penman.[87]