Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/728

708 artists, who exhibited such skill in animal-sketching, do not show to much advantage. There is one study of a head, representing a grotesque profile. Two other figures represent the forearm and hand, four fingers being visible, and the thumb concealed. Add to these the fishing-scene and two hunting-scenes, and you have the complete list of figures relating to man in the Troglodytic Museum.

As I have already said, sculptures are of rarer occurrence here than engraved designs. Of the former we have not above half a dozen, all found at Laugerie-Basse. One of these, the property of the Marquis de Vibraye, represents a woman, and all the others represent animals, viz., a reindeer, head of the same animal, head of a mammoth (referred to already), and also one of some unknown animal. Finally, we have M. Massénat's latest discovery, known as the Bœufs Jumeaux (twin-oxen), which represents a pair of oxen, or, perhaps, of aurochsen.

These sculptures are sometimes incomplete, and always ill executed; but in the art of design the artists display surprising ability. They sketched the human figure badly, but they studied carefully the form and the gait of animals, which they sometimes reproduced with a degree of exactitude, elegance, and spirit, which evince the true artistic sentiment.



UR country, right or wrong,&rdquo; is a sentiment not unfrequently expressed on the other side of the Atlantic; and, if I remember rightly, an equivalent sentiment was some years ago uttered in our own House of Commons, by one who rejoices, or at least who once rejoiced, in the title of philosophical radical.

Whoever entertains such a sentiment has not that equilibrium of feeling required for dealing scientifically with social phenomena. To see how things stand, apart from personal and national interests, is essential before there can be reached those balanced judgments respecting the course of human affairs in general, which constitute Sociology. To be convinced of this, it needs but to take a case remote from our own. Ask how the members of an aboriginal tribe regard that tide of civilization which sweeps them away. Ask what the North-American Indians said about the spread of the white man over their territories, or what the ancient Britons thought of the invasions which dispossessed them of England; and it becomes clear that events which, looked at from an un-national point of view, were steps toward