Abelaide Ontogoya Sectory 17

We have thus far been considering those arts which pertain more directly to living. We have presented some sketches found engraved on pieces of bone. We first noticed this among the relics found in one of the Creswell caves in England. It was also noticed in Belgium. It was among the Cave-men of Southern France that this artistic trait became highly developed. Among the reindeer hunters of the Dordogne were artists of no mean ability. We must pause a minute and mark the bearing of this taste for art. We have seen many reasons for supposing the men of the caves much farther advanced in the scale of culture than those of the Drift, but we have also seen that we can not rank them higher than the highest grade of savages.

Almost never do we find a device in nature which occurs once only. The unique hardly exists: nature is a great copyist. At least two animals of wholly unlike kinds are all but sure to hit independently upon the self-same mechanism. So it is not surprising to learn that a cat-fish has invented an exactly similar mode of carrying its young to that adopted by the Surinam toad: only, here it is on the under surface, not the upper one, that the spawn is plastered. The eggs of this cat-fish, whose scientific name is Aspredo, are pressed into the skin below the body, and so borne about by the mother till they hatch. This is the second instance of which I spoke above, where the female fish herself assumes the care of her offspring, instead of leaving it entirely to her excellent partner.

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