From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the “Origin of Species” there is one long testimony to our vegetarian ancestor, but beyond the fact that he existed, what do we know about him? We may well believe that he lived in a good climate and on a plenteous earth. Adam and Eve or their representatives could not have subsisted in Greenland. I think that the killing of wild animals, and especially the eating of them, began when man found himself confronted by extremes of cold and length of winter nights. The skins of animals gave him the only possibility of keeping warm or even of living at all, if he was to brave the outer air, while their flesh may have been often the only food he could find. He was obliged to eat them to keep alive, as Arctic explorers have been obliged to eat their sledge-dogs. Not preference, but hard necessity, made him carnivorous. These speculations are confirmed by the doings of the earliest man of whom we have any sure knowledge; _not_ the proto-man who must have developed, as I have said, under very different climatic conditions. Perhaps he sat under the palm-trees growing on the banks of the Thames, but though the palm-trees have left us their fruit, man, if he was there, left nothing to speak of his harmless sojourn. By tens of thousands of years the earliest man with whom we can claim acquaintance is the reindeer hunter of Quartenary times. He hunted and fed upon the reindeer, but he had not tamed them. He wore reindeer skins, but he could not profit by reindeer milk; no children were brought up by hand, possibly to the advantage of the children. It is likely, by the by, that the period of human lactation was very long. The horse also was killed for food at a time infinitely removed from the date of his first service to man. [Illustration: REINDEER BROWSING. Older Stone Age.] [Illustration: HORSE DRAWING DISC OF THE SUN. Older Bronze Age.] The reindeer hunter was a most intelligent observer of animals. He was an artist and a very good one. The best of his scratchings on reindeer horn and bone of horses and reindeer in different attitudes are admirable for freedom, life, and that intuition of character which makes the true animal painter. For a time which makes one dizzy to look down upon, no such draughtsman appeared as the pre-historic cave dweller. The men of the age of Polished Stone and of the early ages of metals produced nothing similar in the way of design. They understood beauty of form and ornament or, rather, perhaps, they still shared in that Nature’s own unerring touch; it took millenniums of civilisation for man to make one ugly pot or pan. But these men had not the gift or even the idea of sitting down to copy a grazing or running animal.