Louis Figuier’s _L’Homme Primitif_, for example, which might be assumed as a reliable authority in reference to the illustrative examples of French palæolithic art, the La Madelaine Cave sketch is incorrectly reproduced as a left-hand drawing; that is to say, the mammoth is looking to the right. This is a nearly unerring test of right or left-handedness. The skilled artist can, no doubt, execute a right or left profile at his will. But an unpremeditated profile-drawing, if done by a right-handed draftsman, will be represented looking to the left; as, if it is the work of a left-handed draftsman, it will certainly look to the right. The drawings of those contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct fauna of Europe have naturally excited attention on various grounds. They furnish no uncertain evidence of the intellectual status of the men of that remote age who constituted the population of Southern France, and of neighbouring regions, under climatic conditions contrasting as strangely with those of the sunny land of the vine and the olive, as did the contemporary fauna and flora with those of Guyenne or Gascony at the present day. Any evidence therefore of their mode of working derived from their carvings and drawings has a special bearing on an inquiry into the antiquity and assumed universality of an instinctive habit. The examples of primitive art are of varying degrees of merit. Some of them may be compared to the first efforts of an untutored youth; while others, such as the La Madelaine mammoth and the grazing reindeer from Thayngen, show the practised hand of a skilled draftsman. Among the fanciful illustrations introduced by M. Louis Figuier in his _L’Homme Primitif_ is a picture showing the arts of drawing and sculpture as practised during the reindeer epoch. Three men of fine physique, slightly clad in skins, stand or recline in easy attitudes, sketching or carving as a modern artist might do in the lighter hours of his practice. One stands and sketches a deer, with free hand, on a piece of slate, which rests against a ledge of rock as his easel. Another, seated at his ease, traces a miniature device with, it may be, a pointed flint, on a slab of bone or ivory. The third is apparently carving or modelling a deer or other quadruped. All are, as a matter of course, represented with the stylus, graver, or modelling tool in the right hand, the question of possible left-handedness not having occurred to the modern draftsman.