Most of the rest of the world remains largely oblivious to the excitement. Apart from a few initial snaps in the press, there has been little opportunity for the general public to admire the paintings, the cave itself having been sealed for research purposes. The publication this week of a new book, with 80 colour photographs of the paintings, should change that, and bring to wider attention one of the most astonishing historical finds of our time. Preliminary research suggests that the 35,000-year-old drawings were partly religious in nature. They removed the rubble, and uncovered a vast cave that had been sealed off from the outside world for hundreds of centuries. Inside, they found themselves face to face with more than 200 cave paintings of animals that once roamed Europe: rhinos, lions, bears and bison - stunning portraits now verified as the world's oldest known paintings. Academic circles have been thrown into turmoil by the discovery of what is now known (after one of the cavers who found it) as the Chauvet cave.
The Doctor himself, who laboured nine years over it, would surely agree that lexicographical drudgery, while harmless, is better automated.. ON 18 December 1994, three French cavers were exploring a canyon in southern France when they felt a draught of warm air coming from a pile of stones. Ventures like these affirm the continuity between the age of print and the age of electronics.
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As a milestone in the organisation of information about the English language, Johnson's dictionary is an essential addition to the digital canon. As a demonstration of the possibilities of new media, it is rudimentary. You can view the texts of the first and fourth editions, separately or together, search them for words and click the icons by them to see what the original version looked like.Above all, it is a cultural statement. The facsimile images of the original edition of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (Cambridge University Press pounds 195), which accompany the text of the new CD-ROM version, look jagged and indistinct, ill at ease extracted from their soft bed of paper.But they also serve as a reminder that print publishing has itself evolved a long way. If we imagine we move significantly closer to the 18th century by opening a modern book than by loading a modern disk, we're kidding ourselves.Dr Johnson's CD-ROM is very far from the all-singing, all-dancing multimedia affairs hailed as the vanguard of the industry. It is resolutely functional, though Anne McDermott's introduction affirms that it is a labour of scholarly love. He is right that the vehicles of the new media will evolve beyond their prototypes, but the analogy implies that the prototypes will be completely superseded A place will remain for books, with hyperknobs on. And works specially created for electronic media will actually encourage their hybrid cousins, by getting people excited about reading from computer screens.The obverse of the argument that new media demand new forms is that old forms of writing should stay on paper where they belong, in touch with the conditions under which they were created. Readers can put it to fresh uses; publishers can make fresh profits from it.New forms certainly will emerge.