condition as they were left by the Magdalénien artists. At the outset we are told that while Altamira carries the palm for polychrome paintings, Niaux is unsurpassed for its freehand drawings. These appear to have been executed with a fine brush, and paint made of charcoal, oxide of manganese, and some oily stuff. Many of the figures display great freedom in linear drawing, unfaltering precision in aim, and astonishing artistic effect. The animals depicted are those usually met with in the painted caverns bison, horse, goat, and stag, the first named being by far the most numerous. None of them, however, attains life size, the largest, a horse (un chef d'ceuvre)
FIG. 81. Horse, copied from the Salon Noir of the Grotte de Niaux ; scale, T V (After C. and B., L'Anth.)
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measures 1.50 metres in length (Fig. 81), while the smallest is only 20 centimetres. Most of the bisons are about 80 centimetres in length. In several instances the investigators observed that some natural projection in the rock, which, to the eye of the artist, simulated some prominent portion of an animal, was utilised as part of the drawing to which the other parts of the animal were made to fit. This adaptation is well shown in Fig. 82, where the dorsal line of a small rampant bison is formed by a natural curved ridge in the rock. One of the new facts, elicited from the Niaux drawings, is that some of the animal figures have one or more arrows painted over their flanks in red or black, as shown by the figure of the largest
