A letter from Mr. Falconer in yesterday's Times gives a
very curious account of the works of art which appear to have been produced by the flint civilization, in other words, the European races which preceded the discoveries of the metals, and had to work their sculpture with flint tools. M. Lartet and Mr. Henry Christy have been exploring the caverns of the Dordogne (the ancient province of Perigord), and of the arrondissement of Sarlat in the south western part of central France. In the cavern called Leer - Eyzies, among numerous fragments of a hard slate foreign to the district, they found two plates each bearing the engraved repre- sentation of a quadruped. One of these appears to be a herbivor- ous animal, the other a moose deer, but both engravings are injured by very old fractures. M. Lartet considers these the earliest known examples of engravings on stone by prinneval men of the reindeer period in Europe. Under the cliffs of La Madeleine, Laugerie-Haute, and Laugerie-Basse were discovered the principal sculptures, among bones of the horse, ibex, chamois, reindeer, &c., molar teeth of the extinct Irish elk and the mammoth. Laugerie- Haute seems to have been the manufactory for flint implements, and Laugerie-Basse for horn implements, chiefly of reindeer. There is a long dagger or short thrust sword formed out of a single horn. The handle represents the body of a reindeer, "the parts in fair proportion, and treated with singular skill. The fore-legs are folded easily under the body, the hind-legs drawn out insensibly into the blade." "A convenient hollow for the grip of the hand is produced by a continuous curve, extending from the rump to the muzzle." M. Lartet thinks the hand must have been much smaller than those of modern Europeans. But perhaps it was a boy's weapon. One relic of reindeer bone was found "pierced through and through by a flint weapon,"—a sufficient proof that flint was to them what iron is to us,—and scarcely less useful in their more efficient bands. Do human art and our in- dustrial resources decline, in proportion to the alien assistance ren- dered to them by. scientific invention 7
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