We need not go far, however, to find a man who, living under nearly the same conditions as the reindeer hunter of Southern France, has developed the same artistic aptitude. I shall always recall with pleasure my visit to a Laplander’s hut; it was in the broad daylight of Arctic midnight—no one slept in the hut, except an extraordinarily small baby in a canoe-shaped cradle. The floor was spread with handsome furs, and its aspect was neither untidy nor comfortless. I reflected that this was how the cave dweller arranged his safe retreat. Much more strongly was he brought to my mind by the domestic objects of every sort made of reindeer horn and adorned with drawings. As I write I have one of them before me, a large horn knife, the sheath of which ends with the branching points. It is beautifully decorated with _graffiti_, showing the good and graceful creature without whom the Laplander cannot live. The school of art is distinctly Troglodite. A theory has been started that the man of the Quartenary age drew his horses and his reindeer solely as a magical decoy from the idea that the pictures “called” the game as whistling (_i.e._, imitating the sound of the wind) “calls” the wind. I do not know that the Lapps, though practised in magic, have any such purpose in view. It is said that it would be absurd to attribute a motive of mere artistic pleasure to the Troglodite. Why? Some races have as natural a tendency to artistic effort as the bower-bird has to decorate its nest. Conditions of climate may have given the hunter periods of enforced idleness, and art, in its earliest form, was, perhaps, always an escape from _ennui_, a mode of passing the time. That the early hunter dealt in magic is likely enough; he is supposed, though not on altogether conclusive grounds, to have been a fetich-worshipper, and fetich-worship is akin to some kinds of magic. But it does not follow that _all_ his art had this connexion. How animals appeared to his eyes we know; what he thought about them he has not told us. The Eskimo, the modern pre-historic man who is believed to be a better-preserved type than even the Lapp, may be asked to speak for him.