Mr. Belloc Discovers a Mare’s-Nest
And yet he must have looked at the reproductions of these rock paintings given in the Outline. Because in his ninth paper he comes out with the most wonderful of all the mare’s-nests he has discovered in the Outline of History, and it concerns these very pictures. You see there is an account of the Reindeer men who lived in France and North Spain, and it is said of them that it is doubtful if they used the bow. Mr. Belloc declares that it is my bitter hatred of religion that makes me say this, but indeed it is not. It is still doubtful if the Reindeer hunters had the bow. The fires of Smithfield would not tempt me to say certainly either that they had it or that they did not have it, until I know. But they seem to have killed the reindeer and the horse and bison by spearing them. Mr. Belloc may have evidence unknown to the rest of mankind in that Humbert safe of his, otherwise that is the present state of our knowledge. But, as I explain on pages 56 and 57 in language that a child might understand, simultaneously with that reindeer-hunting life in the north there were more advanced (I know the word will disgust Mr. Belloc with its horrid suggestion of progress, but I have to use it) Palæolithic people scattered over the greater part of Spain and reaching into the South of France who had the bow. It says so in the text: “Men carry bows” runs my text, describing certain rock pictures reproduced in my book. I wrote it in the text; and in the legends that are under these pictures, legends read and approved by me, the statement is repeated. The matter is as plain as daylight and as plainly stated. Mr. Belloc will get if he says over to himself slowly: “Reindeer men, bows doubtful; Azilian, Capsian men to the south, bows certainly.” And now consider Mr. Belloc, weaving his mare’s-nest:—
“Upon page 55 he writes, concerning the Palæolithic man of the cave drawings, this sentence: ‘it is doubtful if they knew of the bow.’
“When I first read that sentence, I was so staggered, I could hardly believe I had read it right.
“That a person pretending to teach popular prehistorical science in 1925 should tell us of the cave painters that it was ‘doubtful if they knew of the bow’ seemed to me quite out of nature.
“It was the more extraordinary because here before me, in Mr. Wells’s own book, were reproductions of these cave paintings, with the bow and the arrow appearing all over them! Even if he did not take the trouble to look at the pictures that were to illustrate his book, and left that department (as he probably did) to hack work, he ought, as an ordinary educated man, to have known the ultimate facts of the case.
“Palæolithic man was an archer, and an archer with an efficient weapon.
“The thing is a commonplace; only gross ignorance can have overlooked it; but, as I have said, there is a cause behind that ignorance. Mr. Wells would not have made this enormous error if he had not been possessed with the necessity of making facts fit in with his theology.”