Nor is it enough to say that the prehistoric carvings are merely true to nature. Their merit is clearly seen when compared with the plates of Indian drawings and picture writings in Schoolcraft’s history of the Indian tribes of the United States: or again, of a different character altogether, the illuminations in Indian and Persian manuscripts. In some respects these last are of the highest quality as regards execution, but the animals are generally drawn in a manner purely conventional, with scant feeling of truth or beauty, and little power of expressing it.
In short, the prehistoric carvings are from the hands of men who were neither beginners nor blunderers in their art. The practised skill of a modern wood engraver would scarcely exceed in firmness and decision, nor in evident rapidity of execution, the outline of the animals in the example which is here engraved.
Other illustrations are given in order that the reader may compare them, and more especially those also just referred to above, with a woodcut (on preceding page) of drawings incised upon bone by Esquimaux of our own days. This has been chosen because there seems to be a general disposition, in the way of theory, to compare the dwellers in the caves of Dordogne and the men of the stone age with the Esquimaux, and to limit, as it were, the unknown amount of civilisation in the one by what we have learnt from our own experience of the latter. Yet, so far as the drawings and the sculptures are concerned, there is scarcely room for comparison. The work of the stone age is that of a people with whom, if they were in all other respects savages, we have no modern parallel. The work of the Esquimaux is that of men who imitate with the hand of a child, and the success or power of whose imitation ranges exactly with their advance and culture (if culture it may be called) in other arts.
The first of these illustrations is perhaps the best, as it is certainly the most delicate and graceful of all the fragments yet discovered. It represents the profile of the head and shoulder of an ibex, carved in low relief upon a piece of the palm of a reindeer’s antler. So exact and well characterised is the sculpture, that naturalists have no hesitation in deciding the animal to be an ibex of the Alps, and not of the Pyrenees.