The amusing, though fanciful, drawings of E. T. Reed are
as much as most of us know about prehistoric man. We have smiled at his distorted fauna and at his strange, unlikely humans, but almost despite ourselves these caricatures have stuck in our minds and we persist in thinking of prehistoric man in terms of E. T. Reed. Alas, tempora mutantur ! For the archaeologists have been busy digging and exploring, and now comes Professor G. Renard to tell us the whole story which the spade has revealed. And how charmingly he tells it ! Learning and imagination are so happily allied that we are at once reconciled to our disillusionment. He has reconstructed prehistoric life and into bare bones has breathed his vitalizing magic. It is an entrancing story of struggle, discovery, and invention : gradually chaos gives place to coherence, and the art of living supersedes the art of keeping alive. Fancy rarely gets out of hand and the few slips which we have noticed are small blemishes in what the author modestly calls " a provisional essay." Life and Work in Prehistoric Times (Kegan Paul, 12s. ed.) is a notable addition to the History of Civilisation series, but we must protest that, while the plates are excellent, the paper does not lend itself to illustrations in the text.
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