And, as there are good reasons for
believing that my old master and his contemporaries lived just before
the greatest cold of the Glacial Epoch, and that his immediate
descendants, with the animals on which they feasted, were driven out of
Europe, or out of existence, by the slow approach of the enormous ice
sheet, we may, I think, fairly conclude that his date was somewhere
about B.C. 248,000. In any case we must at least admit, with Mr. Andrew
Lang, the laureate of the twenty-five thousandth century, that
He lived in the long long agoes;
'Twas the manner of primitive man.
The old master, then, carved his bas-relief in pre-Glacial Europe, just
at the moment before the temporary extinction of his race in France by
the coming on of the Great Ice Age. We can infer this fact from the
character of the fauna by which he was surrounded, a fauna in which
species of cold and warm climates are at times quite capriciously
intermingled. We get the reindeer and the mammoth side by side with the
hippopotamus and the hyena; we find the chilly cave bear and the Norway
lemming, the musk sheep and the Arctic fox in the same deposits with the
lion and the lynx, the leopard and the rhinoceros. The fact is, as Mr.
Alfred Russel Wallace has pointed out, we live to-day in a zoologically
impoverished world, from which all the largest, fiercest, and most
remarkable animals have lately been weeded out. And it was in all
probability the coming on of the Ice Age that did the weeding.
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