It is little use to think of England in the Dordogne, especially as one is far enough north of Avignon, Carcassonne, Nîmes, and Arles to escape the atmospheric pressure of the Times. It is a limestone country incised into flat and mostly narrow valleys by waterways which have degenerated into marshy rivulets, or been civilized into the Beune, the Dronne, the Dordogne, and the Vézère, spanned by those innumerable mediæval and Renaissance bridges which differ as one flower from another. The Dordogne province is a human palimpsest, and has a glow and warmth of look about it into the bargain. Though its naked rock masses recall Cornwall, it has nothing of Cornish remoteness and savagery, while their corner-turning bluffs into the next valley there is always a next valley and a next- are never angular. Yet the Dordogne is wild too, and an undiscovered country from which no traveler ever wants to return so wild that the little valley tossing round the curve over there may lap a wild boar, and him perhaps rubbing his historic self against the masonry of some mouldered château of the twelfth century, a gaunt shell from which the turbid sea of human life has departed. If you will Anglicize the Dordogne, you might at a pinch call it a mixture of Quantock, for the thin woodland pelt of its slopes, and Mendip, for its natural architecture in the round and winding ways of gloom beneath the hill-crust.

But the Dordogne, for all its maze of adventurous valleys, some so mignon that you think you might jump over them from one vast rock-portal to the other, has a coherent modeling which is its very own and totally unlike the configuration of other limestone ranges. Its broader valleys that of the Vézère, for example-release lateral tributaries with the careless gestures of an artist with more creative capital than he knows what to do with, and it is above these confluences that the rockmonsters of headland, smooth at a distance as the ball of a thumb, throw out their bosses and overhang the sward beneath. The waters, too, have accomplished the patient art of chiseling terrific fans and vaults of bare rock out of screens of vegetation into space, and you can walk along more than one village street and hardly know that it rains. You are umbrellaed by the scapular bones of the earth. But I am not sure the Dordogne does not owe its masterpiece of mingled beauties, that nobility and variety of contour, sweet confusion of nakedness and luxuriance, wildness and welcome, alternations of soft and rugged, to one act of craftsmanship alone. That is the flatness of its valleys. They really are floors; and so the soars and sweeps of the hills really are walls. Not a line is lost, and each one travels on to meet another at a clear run, so that I understood what the Psalmist meant when he sang the dancing of the hills.

The hills that put so fair and strong a face upon the world are hollow, and in

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their bowels greater wonders than in all the world beside. I spent my time like a marmot diving in and out of holes, from the uncreate limbos of night and skeleton Earth, haunted by the life-hot inspiration of the child-men of old, out again into this lovely world. There were the reindeer teeth embedded in the rubble of Laugerie Basse. A step, and I looked out to the fortified church of Les Eyzies, two square turrets holding up a barn that could stall a herd of urus, the beaming islets of the Vézère, the procession of stooping rock-bastions lit up in old gold beyond the further bank, the valley champaign streaming away to north and south and stuck with little cypresses. Time swung me like a censer from age to age. Or, flylike, I climb the pulpit-rock of Font-deGaume and up the twisting pathway in the wake of the cave-bear catching his hairs in the juniper bushes as he slouches, into the mouth of the cavern, - almost it roars, through the passages, and on to the Hall of the Bisons! The Hall of the Bisons-executed by some Magdalenian Leonardo when Egypt was a babe, when France was Siberia and the trumpeting mammoths churned the gleaming Vézère into mud. Almost I see them when the sun runs to me like a lover again; and I do see the cobalt sky, the shaggy hillside over against me, shadow-blue and ribbed with snow, the green-valley carpet between us, and the wall-creeper sidling up and down the rock-face and flirting his rounded wings as he did when that lioness who lives for ever on the cavern wall yawned below him. Did she not purr when the Magdalenian sun shot out at her from the snow-cloud? Now I was held suspended in timelessness.

Or I go spiraling up to the roof of La Mouthe, where the wolfsbane is in bud and the ibex in the cavern below poises eternally for his leap. I look down upon the sons of the Cro-Magnons dressing

the hay, piling fagots on to the oxwains in their shirt-sleeves, the streams sparkling like the crystal gardens of the caverns, hazels dripping in catkins, the women sitting on the grass in their unsightly black cloth with their comely black sheep about them, and a flycatcher hawking among the osiers. It was January, and a day later came down upon me the Ice Age. Thus I kept on losing my way among these many worlds, world of the half-men of Le Moustier, world of the mighty beasts that live as snorting a life in the recesses of the caves as ever they did in the Great Age of the Mammals, world of the megaliths when the reindeer men met gods and kings and priests and lost their art for ever, world of the monk and the baron, the Catholic and the Huguenot, an Ice Age of the mind with forms of beauty as strange, shy, and tormented as the stalactites of the grottoes, world of the Revolution when the château slipped back into the fold of Nature, world without end of the gloom-mazes of the rock, and world of the primrose. A palimpsest from Rhinoceros tichorhinus down to me. Time plays a sonorous carillon in the Dordogne.

For some hours I lived, as it were, an eternal life in the Underworld of the Dordogne. For this is what those fishers and hunters of anything between twelve and six thousand years ago managed to do with their pointed flints, stone saucers of flickering grease, palettes daubed with pounded earths: they transported their surprising world out of the light of day, and in perpetual night enchanted it into a new reality of pulsing and immortal forms, growling, charging, stalking, sniffing, and cropping under your very nose, some ten thousand years after they were born of their Creator's vision. A few, so masterly few, scratches and daubs made by the cave-men in the absolute

of night, by the first men that were men, upon a surface emerged from the grinding and roughing of æons of natural travail- and through the Underworld moves an Eden of the beasts that the ages of the mind with. all its voyages and conquests cannot belittle, and the years themselves with their everlasting dull tramp could not wither. The books tell us that the cavemen eternized their subjects as a process of magic for securing their stomachful of the ungulates and protecting themselves against the carnivores. But what about this magic of the spirit, this godlike endowment of men unversed in the kindergarten things we civilized perform by the mechanism of unconscious memory, a secondary magic that from the womb of the rock calls into life, perfect life, the teeming herds of their upper day?

Here are paintings, sculptures, and engravings of men without government or social classes, without war or buildings, and more careless of their own supreme art than Shakespeare of his manuscripts, since I have seen mammoth superposed on bison, reindeerwild boar on mammoth-bison. Yet they are masterpieces that academy and art school could but lifelessly copy, and remain grandly aloof from all schools, theories, and fashions of art. These savages whose brutalities keep our circulating libraries on a sound financial footing had their dodges, of courseline drawings in black and red, shaded black drawings, frescoes in brown or black monochrome, slight or full polychromes, stipples, flat tints, even impressionist designs of reindeer herds. They were craftsmen all through, and worked in their tough and elementary material as though they had made the rocks for the glory of scratching them. But, however astonishing their technical mastery in a medium so intractable, the supreme fact is that the best of

their art is flawless, the flower of perfection blossoming in the inchoate beginnings of human life just taken human form.

Darwinian and man-i'-th'-street alike are, indeed, so obsessed with their cave-man fantasy that the art of the Cro-Magnons, though known for twenty years, has had no influence whatever upon modern thought. And what an art! Owing to candle and electric light and the superb vandalism of visitors who carve their names upon the first and, of their kind, the greatest works of pictorial art achieved by the human race, many of the drawings are going back to rock. It is hard to seize their outlines. But when you do, the rock, urged, it appears, by some ancestral sigh welling from the abysses of our human being, gives birth, and there, seven hundred feet from the mouth of the cave, and fenced within the primeval darkness, is a little steppe-horse cantering over the meadows and with every line, curve, muscle, and tendon of his workmanlike body realized in some casual strokes with a dash of shading. A bison rampant with eyes of fire, a toy mammoth full of comedy with these acts of creation taking shape every minute, one might be watching a drama of Genesis. In the Grotte des Eyzies there is the shadow of a bear on the wall and the bear is behind you no, it's only a Magdalenian bas-relief. At Cap Blanc, high up in a scoop of the cliff looking toward the twelfthcentury château of Comarques, square and scowling over three valleys, is a sculptured horse standing in its rock stable with a repose and majesty so profound, and caught and fixed so marvelously, that, as for Dürer, the only draftsman of animals in all the civilized ages who has ever approached these wild artists whose fathers knew the Mousterian ape-men-well, Dürer would have known his brethren. Here

no,

I have said nothing about the beautiful carvings in bone, ivory, and horn of these ancient children who confound the wise. And I have a copy of a laughing horse originally done in reindeerhorn which is a grotesque as authentic as any executed with a 'kindly malice' on a medieval capital. It has been the theorists of the cave-man who have lacked a sense of humor.

From their Red Sea shells, and from other indications that I cannot go into here, one knows that these uncouth ones had wide intercommunications and practised a cult of life which subsequently in Egypt was systematized into a religion. From their tools, from the

Esquimaux who were the lineal descendants of a branch of the CroMagnons, and from the study of other genuinely primitive peoples still in existence, one concludes that the cavemen of the Upper Paleolithic, whose fictitious example has served the modern doctors and preachers of mankind with so many delusions and so criminal a gospel of the nature of man, had peace unbroken in their time. They were not pacifists they never knew there was such a thing as war. Was it from them and their kin that the persistent human tradition of the Golden Age was born? Truly, in the Dordogne they had the right setting for it.

CONSIDERING how important they are to us, our five senses have received at the hands of present-day science rather less than their proper share of attention. We know a good deal about the sense of sight, because it is indispensable to us; about the sense of hearing we know less; and when we come to the most primitive of the special senses, that of smell, we know practically nothing at all. Whatever other reasons there may be for this, one is that smell plays a comparatively small part in our modern life; it is a much neglected sense, usually dismissed as being vestigial or undeveloped and scarcely worthy of serious attention. Sensations of smell are perceived by an organ of extreme simplicity, and yet by one 1 From Discovery (London popular-science monthly), March

that has extraordinary powers of discrimination; unnoticed though they be, they of all sensations have the greatest effect on our thoughts and emotions. Indeed, the sense of smell, instead of being the last, might well be considered the first of the five, whether we give it this place because of its importance, its primitiveness, or its mystery. It is more nearly connected with our inner emotional life than are the more practically useful senses of sight and hearing, and at the same time a study of it presents more interesting points than most people realize.

Sensations of smell, unless you like to count those of touch, are the most elementary sensations we know, occurring as they do throughout the whole scale of animal creation, even in

creatures so lowly as the sea anemone. As one might expect, the organ that receives these sensations is in itself simple, consisting of myriads of tiny units, - the olfactory cells, whose appearance is invariable throughout the entire animal kingdom. Each little cell is a rod-shaped body ending in an enlargement on which is a cluster of fine hairs; at the other end of the cell is a nerve fibre which, joining with others, forms the olfactory nerve or nerve of smell proceeding to the brain. In man these little cells are restricted to a small area - about a square inch in size situated in the deeply seated parts of the nose, the little hairs of the cells projecting into the current of air that is always passing up and down as we breathe. In some animals, such as the dog, the cells occupy a larger area in the nose, while in others, such as the whales and seals, the area is much smaller; indeed, the development of the olfactory organ appears to go hand in hand with the animal's requirements, the dog and the fourfooted tribe obviously needing the sense of smell more than do the seals and whales. In insects the olfactory cells lie in little culs-de-sac in the antennæ and mouth parts, while in the sea anemone they are found on the surface of the skin; wherever they are situated their structure is much the same just rod-shaped cells with hairs at one end. And wherever they are found there is to be seen lying among them certain pigment cells cells of great importance, as we shall

see.

Compared with the ear or the eye, the structure of the olfactory organ is therefore one of great simplicity. 'Yes,' you will say, 'but look how much simpler its function is. The nose has only to deal with smells, much simpler things than colors or sounds.' In which remark you are mistaken.

The sense of smell possesses an unrivaled power of discrimination, for we can, by this simple organ, detect the most minute quantities of odorous substances in the air we breathe.

The special instrument used for finding the sensitivity of the olfactory cells to various odors is called an olfactometer, there being many different forms. One of the most commonly used consists of a porous tube that slides over a fixed metal tube; according to the position of the porous tube, which is impregnated with the odorous substance, a greater or a less quantity of that substance is carried to the nostrils. If the tube is saturated with vanillin, we find that the average person can recognize as little as one thousand-millionth of a gramme. Nor is this the limit, for other substances are recognized in even smaller quantity. This extraordinary power of perception is well enough known to everybody, for we all know that we can detect impurity in the air of a room by the smell, although chemical tests are quite unable to show the presence of impurities. But the sense of smell is not characterized by its power of perception alone; it has just as remarkable a power of discrimination. The variety of odors is unlimited there are all the natural odors, the odors of the plant world and of animals, perfumes belonging to minerals and inorganic material, and the innumerable perfumes of substances synthesized by chemists. Each one the sense of smell can recognize as different; its powers of discrimination are practically unlimited.

Although we can recognize and distinguish an enormous number of odors, we can name very few. There used to be a popular parlor game that consisted of smelling a number of unlabeled bottles, each of which contained a substance with a smell, and