Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/777

Rh Chellean epoch. They belong to the race which MM. do Quatrefages and Hamy have determined, from purely anatomical considerations, as the Canstadt race, after the skull found at that place associated with elephants' bones in 1700. This skull, the Eguisheim skull (near Colmar), the fragments from Denise, the Neanderthal skull, and the la Noulette jawbone, are all that we have of it, and they are, it must be acknowledged, very little. They are enough, however, to give the clew to its general features, and to show its inferiority to the Bushmen and Australians, more marked, according to M. de Mortillet, than the differences between those races and the Europeans. M. de Mortillet believes that the Neanderthal man was violent and pugnacious, and goes so far as to deny him articulate speech. But we can not indulge in such bold conjectures on so little evidence. We know nothing more of the primitive European man, or of his fate. His simultaneous extension over so large a number of points gives occasion for the thought that originally, at least, he represented, not a particular race, but the common stock, in which modifications were destined to be made according as it became localized and specialized under the influence of the extremely varied conditions of the medium in which it found itself at different places. The Neanderthal man was, then, the original of what has followed. Advancing toward the south, he has peopled the earth, and been divided into local races and tribes. The Moustier epoch illustrates in Europe the stage following the first one; and the periods following that of Moustier, which M. de Mortillet has named Solutrean and Magdalenean, from the typical stations at Solutré and la Madeleine, correspond with the times when man, having localized himself, underwent gradual transformations, assuming in different respects the specific characteristics that distinguish those races, developing aptitudes as diverse as the places in which he fixed himself, and stopping at unequal and successive steps of the ladder which he was destined to climb, but which was to lead him to the full exercise of his noblest faculties only on condition of his reaching its highest rounds.

The Solutrean age was only one of rapid transition to the Magdalenean, and appears to have represented a local rather than a secular development. Both ages are the expression of the increasing cold of the glacial period, during which the huge pachyderms gradually disappeared under the growing rigor of the climate, and the reindeer and horse multiplied to take their places. The reindeer came down to occupy Central Europe, without reaching the southern regions, in numerous varieties, all of which, however, were allied to the existing reindeers of Lapland. Of the horse, at least twenty thousand, possibly forty thousand skeletons, have been found at Solutré. Neither of these animals was then domesticated, and the dog was still unknown. Man secured animals by hunting, either killing them on the spot or binding them to take home. The mammoth had become a