Equally well-executed examples of contemporary portraiture, recovered from palæolithic caves of Europe, would be prized above all other relics of its Mammoth or Reindeer period. Nevertheless, striking as is the character of the art of the Aligéwi, it differs only in degree of merit from that of many modern Indian races; and in some of the Algonkin stone-pipes the human figure is carved with well-proportioned symmetry. In such carvings, moreover, even when expended on the decoration of the pipe,—which was employed among so many native tribes in their most important ceremonial and religious observances,—there is rarely anything to suggest a higher aim of the artist than mere decoration. The same may be assumed of the ancient carvers, in such work as they expended on the hafts of the daggers found at Montastrue or Laugerie Basse. But when a carefully executed linear drawing occurs on a rough slab of schist, with its fractured edges left untrimmed, as is the case in examples from the caves of Les Eysies and Massat, the artist manifestly had some other purpose in view; and this I conceive to have been the earliest stage of ideography or picture-writing. He was communicating facts in detail by means of his pencil which his best attempts at verbal description would have failed to convey. Language is even now a very inadequate means of communicating to others specific ideas of form; and some of the most fluent lecturers in those departments of science, such as geology, biology, and anthropology, in which there is a frequent demand for the appreciation of details in form and structure, habitually resort to the chalk and blackboard. Students of my own earlier days will recall, as among their most pleasant memories, the facile pencil with which the gifted naturalist, Edward Forbes, seemed equally eloquent with hand and tongue; and no one who enjoyed the lucid demonstrations of Agassiz in the same fields of scientific research can think of him otherwise than with chalk in hand. To the uncultured, yet strangely gifted Troglodyte of the primeval dawn, language was still more inadequate for his requirements; and hence, as I imagine, the facile pencil was in frequent requisition for purposes of demonstration, with ever-growing skill to the practised hand. Professor de Quatrefages, who has enjoyed unusually favourable opportunities for the study of those productions, thus directs attention to their artistic merits: “The art of the draughtsman, or rather of the engraver, almost constantly applied to the representation of animals, was first tried on bone or horn. They have attempted it on stone. The burin must have been almost always a mere pointed flint. With this instrument, imperfect though it was, the Troglodytes of the Reindeer age succeeded by degrees in producing results altogether remarkable. The first lines are simple and more or less vague. At a later stage they become more defined, and