ARTS 1& THE STONE AGE. 353 



have shown, they are found in one form or other in every country on 

 the face of the globe certain forms are pretty well confined to cer- 

 tain localities, as if each of the tribes or families who used them had 

 its own manufacture. The half-polished and polished celts of Norfolk, 



Fig. 7. Jet Necklace, from Ross-shire. 



Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, vastly outnumber those which have been 

 observed in all other parts of England, from which it would seem that 

 these countries were more populous, or the people more advanced in 

 the arts, than in the rest of the island, or possibly they may have been 

 the manufacturing district of the period. As regards, however, the 

 distribution of the drift-implements, a far more suggestive and im- 

 portant circumstance is to be noticed. As Mr. Evans has observed, 

 the district farthest north of the Thames, in the gravels of which flint 

 implements are at the present time known to have been found, is the 

 basin of the river Ouse and its tributaries. They have, in fact, been 

 found, at one time or other, in every English county lying to the south- 

 east of a line drawn from the Severn to the Great Ouse, correspond- 

 ing thus far with the great escarpment of the oolite, but they have 

 never been met beyond that line ; and it is an interesting subject of 

 speculation to what the dearth of these objects in the country lying 

 to the northwest is to be attributed. If it was habitable and inhab- 

 ited, it is difficult to imagine a reason for their absence, especially as 

 in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire there is abundance of suitable chalk- 

 flint. This line of demarcation is not very much out of that which 

 separates the bowlder-clay districts from those in which no bowlder- 

 clay is met with. May it not have been the case that, when the im- 

 plements were fashioned, Scotland and the northwestern parts of Eng- 

 land were still submerged beneath the glacial sea, and that on their 

 emergence the southeast became in its turn depressed ? 



Notwithstanding all that has been written on the subject, there 

 seems to be still much doubt as to the uses for which some, and no 

 inconsiderable number, of these objects were designed. For all useful 

 purposes it would have sufficed that the cutting-edge of a celt should 

 alone be polished and ground ; yet it is often, indeed usually, found 

 vol. 11. 23 



