The scientific fallacy which has traced man's gradual development from a status just above that of the beast to his present high state of civilization has been due to neglect of the real significance of human life. In the utilities man began low down in the scale and had to develop gradually the things that would help him in has physical life. The notion that this was the only side of man that could possibly have been de veloped in those early days and that his higher msthetic evolution could only come much later was entirely an assumption. It led scientists to conclude that the history of man as a tool maker and a tool-user represented the progress of humanity. What was revealed by the dis coveries made in the cave dwellings was that man cultivated first thetarts and gave play to his sense of beauty and only later turned to the development of the utilities. Before man was a carpenter and made himself artificial houses to live in, dwelling in the caves that he found so convenient, and before he was a tailor and fash ioned his garments to facilitate his work, or a farmer to till the soil and give himself leisure between sowing and harvest, he was an artist and an artistic craftsman whose work now revealed to us commands the reverent regard of the modern. world.
When it was first discovered that there were many remains indicating that a number of gen erations of man had dwelt in the caves of what are now France and Spain the conclusion was jumped to at once that the cave man stage of existence must represent a period in which men were just a little higher than the animals. They were crafty enough to displace the beasts from their lairs in the hillsides and cunning enough to keep them out. Scientists in their eagerness to confirm the theory of evolution went much farther even in this assumption. They represented the cave man as the lowest of savages, quarrelsome, utterly selfish, with no interests except those of his body, ruthlessly ready to fight with his kind on the slightest provocation or even without provocation if he felt that he had the strength or the chance to kill without danger. A favorite theme was that he dragged his female home by violence to keep her as his own, to bear his burdens and his children, the one saving quality in the pic ture being his care for his children, though even this was supposed to be neither consistent nor continuous.
This was the supposedly scientific picture of the cave man that was popularized and the gen eral public has as yet no idea apparently that the discoveries of actual remains in the caves completely contradict this theory. Three modes of art were found in the caves, the movable art, consisting of various utensils decorated prettily, the mural or parietal art of pictures made on the walls of the caves to which more recent discoveries have added the plastic art of rock sculpture and molded clay. The engrav ings on bones and horns and sometimes on stone implements revealed that a real artist was at work in this olden time. He was a man
who saw clearly and could reproduce with fine fidelity often by means of a very few lines what he saw. His work while primitive was not crude, but anticipated in many ways modern impressionistic art, the latest phase of artistic development. There must have been a good many men of the time capable of doing excel lent work in this line for copious remains in many places and even at different horizon; which indicate intervals of generations, base been found.
What is extremely interesting is that the cave man should have tried to make beautily even the every-day utensils that he handled and that he was willing to spend a good deal of tire and care in their decoration. One suggested criterion of cultural advance among men ha been that "there is no culture in the hearts of a people until the very utensils in the kilo` are beautiful as well as useful." The caveg judged by this criterion is rather in advanco than behind most of the peoples of histor.t higher human development. His cave home% have come to recognize especially after treat experience was healthier than the dwellings of the great majority of the human race at the present time, not alone the poor, but even thi rich. He tried to make his home a place of beauty for himself and his family. If we are to judge by how such a thing comes about in the history of long after times, we should be forced to the oanclusion that it was the arc woman who somehow had succeeded in secur ing the surroundings of artistic quality for her self and the children who had to spend so mud more time at home than the cave man himself.
If there had been nothing but the movable art of the caves that in itself when proPoll appreciated would have completely corrected the notion of the cave man as in any way near to the animals. On the contrary he was a motel' man in his interest in beautiful things. TIC discovery of the parietal or mural art sized this very strongly. The walls of the caves were found to be decorated in wag places with pictures of the animals which the cave man hunted. The evolution of this an has now been traced and it manifestly Wu in black and white, that is, the gray wall of the limestone cave as the background for deepfille° made with a sharp piece of flint and then with lamp black as the outline of the The surprise is to find the boldness and of the drawing, the almost complete absence of corrections and the thoroughgoing confiden.Ce with which- the cave artist must have made n4 pictures. He knew exactly what he wanted to reproduce and there was no halting or hesita tion about his line work. Modern artists have not hesitated to declare that some of this draw ing must be counted among the best that has ever been done, especially when the circum stances in which it was accomplished are con sidered.