od or turning the mill.

"Should the wife cease to please her husband, he sells her again; should
she commit a fault, he strips her (the garments will serve for the new
spouse); then he takes her by the hair and smothers her in the marsh.
Nevertheless, however miserable may be her condition of a domestic
animal, this creature has passions. Tacitus informs us that adultery was
not unknown to the purchased wife. The male children belonged to the
father, and always remained with him; as to the aged, the old relatives,
useless and cumbering, they were put 'in a place apart,' a sort of
hollow in the neighborhood of the hole for the hogs or the enclosure for
the cattle, and there was thrown to them the remnants of the meals. The
family sentiment, the voice of kindred blood, did not, as yet, make
itself heard very distinctly."

[Illustration: THE BATHS OF THE EMPEROR JULIAN, CORNER BOULEVARDS ST.
MICHEL AND ST. GERMAIN. Restoration.]

This information may be supplemented by various extracts from the
ancient historians, who give us the usual picture of early man in the
barbarous stage, bellicose, blood-thirsty, brutal, having the one virtue
of courage. Caesar says that when a man of importance died, his wives
were tortured and put to death by fire if suspected of being
instrumental in his taking off; but a short time before his conquests it
was the custom to burn with the defunct his slaves and his favorite
clients. It was also said that the women were not constrained in their
choice of husbands, and that the latter were obliged to furnish an
equivalent for the dowry brought by the wife. Human sacrifices were
offered on certain great occasions, and it was thought possible that one
of the upper stones of the great sepulchre discovered at Meudon in 1845,
indicated one of the sites dedicated to these offerings.

Of the many attempts that have been made to restore the primitive man in
his environments, one of the most learned and interesting is that shown
by M. Cormon, the painter, in his series of large decorations for the
_plafond_ and walls of some ethnological museum, exhibited in the Salon
of 1898. But an artist is an impossible archaeologist; the more of an
artist he is, the more will he be unwilling to represent the merely
bestial, as the scientist finds it; and though the original inhabitant
of the valley of the Seine and other favored spots may have circulated
in some such early landscape, and have garbed himself and ta