Now for my third chapter. "When things come to the worst," says the proverb, "they commonly mend;" and so did this poor frozen and drowned land of England and France and Germany, though it mended very slowly. The land began to rise out of the sea once more, and rose till it was perhaps as high as it had been at first, and hundreds of feet higher than it is now: but still it was very cold, covered, in Scotland at least, with one great sea of ice and glaciers descending down into the sea, as I said when I spoke to you about the Ice-Plough. But as the land rose, and grew warmer too, while it rose, the wild beasts who had been driven out by the great drowning came gradually back again. As the bottom of the old icy sea turned into dry land, and got covered with grasses, and weeds, and shrubs once more, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, oxen—sometimes the same species, sometimes slightly different ones—returned to France, and then to England (for there was no British Channel then to stop them); and with them came other strange animals, especially the great Irish elk, as he is called, as large as the largest horse, with horns sometimes ten feet across. A pair of those horns with the skull you have seen yourself, and can judge what a noble animal he must have been. Enormous bears came too, and hyænas, and a tiger or lion (I cannot say which), as large as the largest Bengal tiger now to be seen in India.

And in those days—we cannot, of course, exactly say when—there came—first, I suppose, into the south and east of France, and then gradually onward into England and Scotland and Ireland—creatures without any hair to keep them warm, or scales to defend them, without horns or tusks to fight with, or teeth to worry and bite; the weakest you would have thought of the beasts, and yet stronger than all the animals, because they were Men, with reasonable souls. Whence they came we cannot tell, nor why; perhaps from mere hunting after food, and love of wandering and being independent and alone. Perhaps they came into that icy land for fear of stronger and cleverer people than themselves; for we have no proof, my child, none at all, that they were the first men that trod this earth. But be that as it may, they came; and so cunning were these savage men, and so brave likewise, though they had no iron among them, only flint and sharpened bones, yet they contrived to kill and eat the mammoths, and the giant oxen, and the wild horses, and the reindeer, and to hold their own against the hyænas, and tigers, and bears, simply because they had wits, and the dumb animals had none. And that is the strangest part to me of all my fairy tale. For what a man's wits are, and why he has them, and therefore is able to invent and to improve, while even the cleverest ape has none, and therefore can invent and improve nothing, and therefore cannot better himself, but must remain from father to son, and father to son again, a stupid, pitiful, ridiculous ape, while men can go on civilizing themselves, and growing richer and more comfortable, wiser and happier, year by year—how that comes to pass, I say, is to me a wonder and a prodigy and a miracle, stranger than all the most fantastic marvels you ever read in fairy tales.

You may find the flint weapons which these old savages used buried in many a gravel-pit up and down France and the south of England; but you will find none here, for the gravel here was made (I am told) at the beginning of the ice-time, before the north of England sunk into the sea, and therefore long, long before men came into this land. But most of their remains are found in caves which water has eaten out of the limestone rocks, like that famous cave of Kent's Hole at Torquay. In it, and in many another cave, lie the bones of animals which the savages ate, and cracked to get the marrow out of them, mixed up with their flint-weapons and bone harpoons, and sometimes with burnt ashes and with round stones, used perhaps to heat water, as savages do now, all baked together into a hard paste or breccia by the lime. These are in the water, and are often covered with a floor of stalagmite which has dripped from the roof above and hardened into stone. Of these caves and their beautiful wonders I must tell you another day. We must keep now to our fairy tale. But in these caves, no doubt, the savages lived; for not only have weapons been found in them, but actually drawings scratched (I suppose with flint) on bone or mammoth ivory; drawings of elk, and bull, and horse, and ibex: and one, which was found in France, of the great mammoth himself, the woolly elephant, with a mane on his shoulders like a lion's mane. So you see that one of the earliest fancies of this strange creature, called man, was to draw, as you and your schoolfellows love to draw, and copy what you see, you know not why. Remember that. You like to draw: but why you like it neither you nor any man can tell. It is one of the mysteries of human nature; and that poor savage clothed in skins, dirty it may be, and more ignorant than you (happily) can conceive, when he sat in the cave scratching on ivory the figures of the animals he hunted, was proving thereby that he had the same wonderful and mysterious human nature as you; that he was the kinsman of every painter and sculptor who ever felt it a delight and duty to copy the beautiful works of God.

Sometimes, again, especially in Denmark, these savages have left behind upon the shore mounds of dirt, which are called there "kjökken-möddings"—"kitchen-middens" as they would say in Scotland, "kitchen-dirtheaps" as we should say here down South—and a very good name for them that is. For they are made up of the shells of oysters, cockles, mussels, and periwinkles, and other shore-shells besides, on which those poor creatures fed; and mingled with them are broken bones of beasts, and fishes, and birds, and flint knives, and axes, and sling-stones; and here and there hearths, on which they have cooked their meals in some rough way; and that is nearly all we know about them: but this we know from the size of certain of the shells, and from other reasons which you would not understand, that these mounds were made an enormous time ago, when the water of the Baltic Sea was far more salt than it is now.