That Mentone Man, To Be Sure, Whose Remains You May
Study At Monaco And Elsewhere, Was A Fine Fellow, Without A Doubt.
He
lived rather long ago.
Even he, by the way, was a tourist on these
shores. And were the air of Mentone not unpropitious to the composition
of anything save a kind of literary omelette soufflee, one might like to
expatiate on Sergi's remarkable book, and devise thereto an incongruous
footnote dealing with the African origin of sundry Greek gods, and
another one referring to the extinction of these splendid races of men;
how they came to perish so utterly, and what might be said in favour of
that novel theory of the influence of an ice-age on the germplasm
producing mutations - new races which breed true ... enough! Let us
remain at the Riviera level.
In the little museum under those cliffs by the sea, where the Grimaldi
caves are, I found myself lately together with a young French couple,
newly married. The little bride was vastly interested in the attendant's
explanations of the habits of those remote folk, but, as I could plainly
see, growing more and more distrustful of his statements as to what
happened all those hundreds of thousands of years ago.
"And this, Messieurs, is the jaw-bone of a cave-bear - the competitor,
one might say, in the matter of lodging-houses, with the gentleman whose
anatomy we have just inspected. Here are bones of hippopotamus, and
rhinoceros, which he hunted with the weapons you saw.
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