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Average One Directory 04
Page 04
The men of the Caves supported life by hunting. But a very small part of their food supplies could have been drawn from the vegetable kingdom. When the climate was so severe that Alpine mosses grew at Schussenreid, acorns and like nuts would be about all they could procure from that source. The animals hunted by the Cave-men were principally reindeer, horses, bisons, and, occasionally mammoths and woolly rhinoceros. But they were not very choice in this matter, as they readily accepted as food any animal they could obtain by force or cunning. Wolves and foxes were not rejected, and in one cave large numbers of the bones of the common water rat were obtained. We know what animals were used as food, because we find their bones split for the purpose of procuring the marrow they contained. This was evidently to them a nutritious article of diet, since they were careful to open all the bones containing it, and bones so split are frequently the only means of detecting the former presence of man in some bone caves.
The vast subject which I have thus lightly skimmed is not without interest, again, from its human implications. Savages as a rule produce enormous families; but then, the infant mortality in savage tribes is proportionally great. Among civilized races, families are smaller, and deaths in infancy are far less numerous. The higher the class or the natural grade of a stock, the larger as a rule the proportion of children safely reared to the adult age. The goal towards which humanity is slowly moving would thus seem to be one where families in most cases will be relatively small--perhaps not more on an average than three to a household--but where most or all of the children brought into the world will be safely reared to full maturity. This is already becoming the rule in certain favored ranks of European society.
It is impossible to read the biographies of some of our most celebrated men, and not to see that with means scanty enough they were enabled to keep their terms with honour, and in the end confer additional celebrity upon the noble foundations where they had studied. If such be the case, we have only the result of personal good or ill conduct to explain the whole of the affair. But enough on this subject.
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