ore artificial, lies so
much in the nature of the case, and is so taken for granted with every
conception of the origin of man, even with that contradictory to Darwinism,
that from this simplicity of {90} the earliest tools we can not at all
conclude that there was a condition of mankind lying near that of animals;
and especially we can draw only general and uncertain conclusions as to
that which makes man _man_, as to the spiritual and moral qualities of
those prehistoric men. Moreover, in discoveries belonging to the very
oldest, we come upon drawings and engravings from which we recognize the
man of those primitive times as a creature whose life was not entirely
taken up in the animalic struggle for existence, but was already adorned
with those ideal pursuits and enjoyments which we are accustomed to ascribe
to the height of civilization. Examine, for instance, the drawing of a
mammoth on a mammoth tooth of Dordogne, which the French scientists Lartet
and Christy have reprinted in their Reliquiae Aquitanicae (1868), and which
Sir Charles Lyell has copied in his "Age of the Human Race." How much
spirit and life in this primitive work of art! Or read what Fraas, in the
"Journal of the German Society for Anthropology," March, 1874, reports
about the picture of a grazing reindeer, engraved on a knife handle made of
the horns of a reindeer, which was lately found in the cave of Thayngen
near Schaffhausen, and which surpasses in beauty all rough drawings thus
far found. The whole bearing of the animal--the muscles of the legs and the
head, the form of the many-branched antlers, with the wide-spread eyes, the
representation of the hair upon the body and under-jaw--all disclose a real
artist among those savages.

This is also to be taken into consideration: that those men, whose traces
we find, could possibly have been the descendants of more noble
predecessors, driven {91} off and degenerated, just as well as they could
have been representatives of the whole former condition of culture of
mankind. In England, where the questions of the first condition of culture
of mankind are very warmly discussed, the Duke of Argyll particularly, in
his "Primeval Man," advocates these views, and very forcibly calls
attention to the fact that thus far the places of the discovery of the
earliest traces of man undoubtedly lie very far from the original home of
the human race; while Sir John Lubbock, in his "Origin of Civilization" and
in his