weller, and
modern investigations have given us a clear and vivid picture of the
life of the ancient race, who existed in France while the mammoth
and the reindeer were roaming over the plains of western Europe.

As civilisation advanced, under changing climatic conditions, and as
man began to improve his tools and implements, he deserted the caves
and preferred to live in houses of his own building. But a long time
after the caves had been abandoned as abodes of the living, they were
still used for interring the dead. Do we not remember the story told
in Genesis, how Abraham bought for 400 shekels a cave from Ephron
that he might bury Sarah there and have a family tomb?

The cave-dwellers of France vanished many thousand years ago; but
there are yet in several parts of the globe, for instance, in Tunis
and in Central Africa, races who still adhere to the custom of living
in caves, although their condition of life is different from that of
the antediluvian cave-dwellers.

In Mexico the cave-dwellers are in a transitory state, most of them
having adopted houses and sheds; but many of them are still unable to
perceive why they should give up their safe and comfortable natural
shelters for rickety abodes of their own making. Padre Juan Fonte,
the pioneer missionary to the Tarahumares, who penetrated into their
country eighteen leagues from San Pablo, toward Guachochic, speaks
of the numerous caves in that country and relates that many of them
were divided into small houses. Other records, too, allude to the
existence of cave-dwellers in that part of the Sierra Madre. Still,
the fact of there being cave-dwellers to-day in Mexico was until
recently known only to the Mexicans living in their neighbourhood,
who regard this condition of things as a matter of course.

While most of the Tarahumares live permanently on the highlands,
a great many of them move for the winter down into the barranca,
on account of its warmer temperature, and, if they have no house,
they live wherever they find a convenient shelter, preferably a cave;
but for want of better accommodations they content themselves with
a rock shelter, or even a spreading tree, This would suit them well
enough were it not that, at least in recent years, there has not been
rain enough in the barrancas to enable the people to raise there the
corn they need. They therefore go back to the highlands in March,
because in the higher altitudes rainfall can be depended upon w