Our Zoo
can boast no mammoth and no mastodon. The sabre-toothed lion has gone
the way of all flesh; the deinotherium and the colossal ruminants of the
Pliocene Age no longer browse beside the banks of Seine. But our old
master saw the last of some at least among those gigantic quadrupeds; it
was his hand or that of one among his fellows that scratched the famous
mammoth etching on the ivory of La Madelaine and carved the figure of
the extinct cave bear on the reindeer-horn ornaments of Laugerie Basse.
Probably, therefore, he lived in the period immediately preceding the
Great Ice Age, or else perhaps in one of the warm interglacial spells
with which the long secular winter of the northern hemisphere was then
from time to time agreeably diversified.
And what did the old master himself look like? Well, painters have
always been fond of reproducing their own lineaments. Have we not the
familiar young Raffael, painted by himself, and the Rembrandt, and the
Titian, and the Rubens, and a hundred other self-drawn portraits, all
flattering and all famous? Even so primitive man has drawn himself many
times over, not indeed on this particular piece of reindeer horn, but on
several other media to be seen elsewhere, in the original or in good
copies. One of the best portraits is that discovered in the old cave at
Laugerie Basse by M. Elie Massenat, where a very early pre-Glacial man
is represented in the act of hunting an aurochs, at which he is casting
a flint-tipped javelin.
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