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Alabaster Blue Sectory 14
Page 08
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.
Melbourne was full of prejudices and whims and hatreds, but his charity was boundless, and he always had a good word for an enemy. He excused the career of Henry VIII to the Queen by saying, "You see, those women bothered him so." And when he was superseded by Peel, he combated the Queen's dislike of her new premier, and did his best to put Peel in a favourable light. When Peel made his first appearance at Windsor, shy and awkward, and holding himself like a dancing-master, it was Melbourne who broke the awkward pause by going up to Peel, and saying in an undertone, "For God's sake, go and talk to the Queen!" When I was privileged to work through all Melbourne's letters to the Queen, so carefully preserved and magnificently bound, I was greatly touched by the sweetness and tenderness of them, the gentle ironical flavour, the delicate freedom, and the little presents and remembrances they exchanged up to the end.
"It is almost impossible to convey in words an idea of the quickness and graceful address of her movements: they may indeed be termed aerial, as she seems merely to touch in her progress the branches among which she exhibits her evolutions. In these feats her hands and arms are the sole organs of locomotion, her body, hanging as if suspended by a rope, sustained by one hand (the right, for example), she launches herself, by an energetic movement, to a distant branch, which she catches with the left hand; but her hold is less than momentary; the impulse for the next launch is acquired; the branch then aimed at is attained by the right hand again, and quitted instantaneously, and so on, in alternate succession. In this manner spaces of twelve and eighteen feet are cleared, with the greatest ease and uninterruptedly, for hours together, without the slightest appearance of fatigue being manifested; and it is evident that, if more space could be allowed, distances very greatly exceeding eighteen feet would be as easily cleared; so that Duvaucel's assertion that he has seen these animals launch themselves from one branch to another, forty feet asunder, startling as it is, may be well credited. Sometimes, on seizing a branch in her progress, she will throw herself, by the power of one arm only, completely round it, making a revolution with such rapidity as almost to deceive the eye, and continue her progress with undiminished velocity. It is singular to observe how suddenly this Gibbon can stop, when the impetus giving by the rapidity and distance of her swinging leaps would seem to require a gradual abatement of her movements. In the very midst of her flight a branch is seized, the body raised, and she is seen, as if by magic, quietly seated on it, grasping it with her feet. As suddenly she again throws herself into action.
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