presentations of his gods. Objects of this kind— rude hewn blocks of stone and wood-were the most sacred effigies of the gods in Greece, and were kept in the dimmest recesses of the temple. No Demeter wrought by the craft of Phidias would have appeared so holy to the Phigalians as the strange old figure of the goddess with the head of a mare. The earliest Greek sacred sculptures that remain are scarcely, if at all, more advanced in art than the idols of the naked Admiralty Islanders. But this is anticipating; in the meantime it may be said that among the sources of savage representative art are the need of something like writing, and ideas suggested by nascent religion.

The singular wall-picture (Fig. 9) from a cave in South Africa, which we copy from the 'Cape Monthly Magazine,' probably represents a magical ceremony. Bushmen are tempting a great water animal—a rhinoceros, or something of that sort―to run across the land, for the purpose of producing rain. The connection of ideas is scarcely apparent to civilised minds, but it is not more indistinct than the connection between carrying a bit of the rope with which a man has been hanged and success at cards—a common French superstition. The Bushman cave-pictures, like those of Australia, are painted in black, red, and white. Savages, like the Assyrians and the early Greeks, and like children, draw animals much better than the human figure. The Bushman dog in our little engraving (Fig. 7) is all alive-almost as full of life as the dog which accompanies the centaur Chiron, in that beautiful vase in the British Museum which represents the fostering of Achilles. The Bushman wall-paintings,

like those of Australia, seem to prove that savage art

is capable of consider-
able freedom, when
supplied with fitting
materials. Men seem
to draw better when
they have pigments
and a flat surface of
rock to work upon,
than when they are
scratching on hard
wood with a sharp
edge of a broken
shell. Though the
thing has little to do
with art, it may be
worth mentioning, as
a matter of curiosity,
that the labyrinthine
Australian caves are
decorated, here and
there, with the mark
of a red hand.
same mysterious, or
at least unexplained,
red hand is impressed
on the walls of the
ruined palaces and
temples of Yucatan-
the work of a vanished
people.

The

There is one sin

gular fact in the history of savage art which reminds us that savages, like civilised men, have various degrees of culture and various artistic capacities. The oldest inhabitants of Europe who have left any traces of their lives and handiwork must have been savages. Their tools and weapons were not even formed of polished stone, but of rough-hewn flint. The people who used tools of this sort must necessarily have enjoyed but a scanty mechanical equipment, and the

life they lived in caves from which they had to drive the cave-bear, and among snows where they stalked the reindeer and the mammoth, must have been very rough. These earliest known Europeans, ‘palæolithic men,' as they are called, from their

use of the ancient unpolished stone weapons, appear to have inhabited the countries now known as France and England, before the great Age of Ice. This makes their date one of incalculable antiquity; they are removed from us by a 'dark backward and abysm of time.' The whole Age of Ice, the dateless period of the polishers of stone weapons, the arrival of men using weapons of bronze, the time which sufficed to change the climate and fauna and flora of Western

Europe, lie between us and paleolithic man.

Yet

in him we must re

cognise a skill more akin to the spirit of modern art than is found in any other savage race. Palæolithic man, like other savages, decorated his weapons; but, as I have already said, he did not usually decorate them in the common savage manner with ornamental patterns. He scratched on bits of bone spirited representations of all the animals whose remains are found mixed with his own. He designed the large headed horse of that period, and science inclines to believe that he drew the breed correctly. His sketches of the mammoth, the reindeer, the bear, and of many fishes, may be

seen in the British Museum, or engraved in such works