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More than 8,000 different objects were taken from the fine Neolithic station of Ors in the isle of Oleron; 12,000 chips of stone, bearing marks of human workmanship, were picked up in the Thayngen Cave, and more than 80,000 in the different caves of Belgium.
Reindeer grazing, from the Thayngen Cave. The representation of the human figure is extremely rare. I have already mentioned the young man trying to strike an aurochs which is running away from him; and the woman wearing a necklace.
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.
Some indistinct traces of engraving have been made out on the bones found in the Altamira Cave, near Santander, and recently a bone on which a kind of horse was engraved, was picked up at Cresswell's Crags, Derbyshire, in a cave known in the district as MOTHER GRUNDY'S PARLOR. This specimen, as were those of Thayngen, was associated with numerous bones of Quaternary animals, amongst which those of the hippopotamus were the most curious.
Is not the memory of these ancient insignia preserved in our own day, and may they not have been the original forms of the sceptres of our kings and the croziers of our bishops? Staff of office made of stag-horn pierced with four holes. Staff of office found at Lafaye. Staff of office in reindeer antler, with a horse engraved on it, found at Thayngen.
Head of OVIBOS MOSCHATUS engraved on wood, found in the Thayngen Cave. Young man chasing the aurochs, from Laugerie. On a reindeer antler is represented a woman with flat breasts and very high hips, followed by a serpent; a shell from the crag near Walton-on-the-Naze had a human face roughly engraved on one side.
Fragment of rib on which is engraved a musk-ox, found in the Marsoulas Cave. Head of a horse from the Thayngen Cave. Bear engraved on a bone from the Thayngen Cave. I referred above to ail exceptional example of prehistoric art found beyond the borders of France. All, especially the last named, are rendered with such perfection, that it was at first supposed that they were the work of a forger.
These staves, of which hundreds have now been found, were picked up in many different places, including the Goyet Cave in Belgium, the caves of Perigord and Charente, and the Veyrier Station in Savoy. At Thayngen, as many as twenty-three were found, all pierced with one hole only.
The flints worked by the cave-men of Belgium, the fossil shells so numerous at Chaleux, in the Frontal and Nuton caves, at Thayngen on the frontier between Switzerland and Germany, in Italy, in the stations of anterior date to the TERREMARE beds, have been found the shells of the pearl oyster of the Indian Ocean, whilst in the caves of the south of France, such as the Madeleine, that of Cro-Magnon, Bize in Herault, and Solutre on the banks of the Saone have been picked up the shells of Arctic marine mollusca.
The high-water mark of palæolithic art is undoubtedly to be found in the reindeer of the cave of Thayngen, in Switzerland, a capital and spirited representation of a buck grazing, in which the perspective of the two horns is better managed than a Chinese artist would manage it at the present day.
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