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one great sea of ice and glaciers descending down into the sea.

12. But as the land rose, and grew warmer, too, while it rose, the wild beasts which had been driven out by the great drowning came gradually back again. As the bottom of the old icy sea turned into dry land, and got covered with grasses, and weeds, and shrubs once more, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, oxen-sometimes the same species, sometimes slightly different ones-returned to France, and then to England (for there was no British Channel then to stop them); and with them came other strange animals, the great Irish elk, as he is called, as large as the largest horse, with horns sometimes fifteen feet across.

13. Enormous bears came too, and hyænas, and a tiger or lion (I cannot say which), as large as the largest Bengal tiger now to be seen in India.

And in those days-we cannot, of course, exactly say when-there came-first I suppose into the south and east of France, and then gradually onward into England and Scotland and Ireland-creatures without any hair to keep them warm, or scales to defend them, without horns or tusks to fight with, or teeth to worry and bite; the weakest you would have thought of all the beasts, and yet stronger than all the animals, because they were MEN, with reasonable souls.

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14. Whence they came we cannot tell, nor why; perhaps from mere hunting after food, and love of wandering and of being independent and alone. Perhaps they came into that icy land for fear of stronger and cleverer people than themselves; for we have no proof, none at all, that they were the first men that trod this earth.

15. But be that as it may, they came; and so cunning were these savage men, and so brave likewise, though they had no iron among them, only flint and sharpened bones, that they contrived to kill and eat the mammoths, and the giant oxen, and the wild horses, and the reindeer, and to hold their own against the hyænas, and tigers, and bears, simply because they had wits, and the dumb animals had none.

16. You may find the flint weapons which these old savages used buried in many a gravel-pit up and down France and the south of England. Most of their remains are found in caves which water has eaten out of the limestone rocks, like that famous cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay.

17. In it, and in many another cave, lie the bones of animals which the savages ate, and cracked to get the marrow out of them, mixed up with their flint weapons and bone harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with round. stones, used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked together into a hard paste or breccia by the lime.

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18. These are in the water, and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped from the roof above and hardened into stone. In these caves, no doubt, the savages lived; for not only have weapons been found in them, but actually drawings scratched (I suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth ivory, drawings of elk, and bull, and horse, and ibex; and one, which was found in France, of the great mammoth him

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self, the woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a lion's mane.

19. So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange creature called MAN was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember that. You like to draw; but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell.

20. It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you happily) can conceive, when he sat scratch

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