Secrets of earth and sea Author:Edwin Ray Lankester Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE ART OF PREHISTORIC MEN THE works of art produced by the cave-men are, as we have already seen, of five kinds or classes— (i) All-round small ... more »statuettes, or "high-relief" carvings, in ivory, bone, or stone (examples of which are shown in Figs. 14, 25, 26, 27, 28 of the present chapter); (2) small engravings on bits of ivory, deer's antler, bone, or stone (examples are shown in Figs. 15, 16, 20, and 24); (3) large statues, hewn in rock, and left in place; (4) drawings of large size—two to five feet in diameter (partly engraved and partly coloured) on the rocky walls and vaults of limestone caverns (shown in Figs. 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 23, as well as in the figures of mammoths in the last chapter); (5) models (high relief) worked in clay. I give reproductions in the present chapter of several samples of this art, showing how skilfully these men of 50,000 years ago could portray a variety of animals. Who were these men, and why did they make these remarkable carvings and drawings ? First, as to their age. We now know of a long succession of human inhabitants of this part of the world, namely, Western Europe. The earliest reach back to an antiquity never dreamed of fifty years ago. We cannot fix with any certainty the number of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of years which is represented by this succession, but we can place the different periods in order, one later than the other, each distinguished chiefly by the character of theworkmanship belonging to it, though in a few instances we have also the actual limb-bones, skulls, and jaw-bones of the men themselves, which differ in different periods. It is practically certain that these prehistoric successive periods of humanity do not represent the steps of growth and change of one single race belonging to ...« less