498 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



kind are earlier required than coal. The mere savage needs nothing 

 more from the mineral world than flint for his arrow-head and ochre 

 for his personal adornment. A little later he requires bronze for his 

 hatchet, gold and amber for his rude jewelry, clay for his hand-mold- 

 ed earthenware. A still more advanced race will learn to prize silver 

 for coins, lapis lazuli for gems, brick-earth for Assyrian temples, granite 

 for Egyptian colossi, marble for Hellenic sculpture, and iron for Roman 

 swords. Only at a very late period of development will man begin to 

 be largely affected by the neighborhood of zinc, lead, and mercury, of 

 rock-salt, kaolin, and plumbago, of slate-quarries, marl-pits, and pipe- 

 clay beds. Last of all will come the economic employment of coal, 

 which in our own island has caused the aggregation of densely massed 

 populations around the great centers of Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, 

 Sheffield. Newcastle, and Birmingham. 



How general is the relation in early stages of civilization we can 

 see from the comparatively close similarity between the life and arts 

 of all the lowest savages. How special it becomes in advanced socie- 

 ties we can see when we consider the cases of Bethesda growing up by 

 the side of the Penrhyn slate-quarries ; of Broseley, entirely engaged 

 in the manufacture of clay tobacco-pipes ; and of Northwich, Middle- 

 wich, and Nantwich supporting themselves by mining rock-salt. 



Nevertheless, even at the earliest period, geological conditions must 

 have largely influenced human life. Tribes which lived among rugged 

 granite or limestone mountains must have been very differently cir- 

 cumstanced from those which ranged over level tertiary lowlands, or 

 settled on the alluvial deltas of modern rivers. During that primitive 

 epoch which Sir John Lubbock has christened the Palaeolithic age, 

 when man first dwelt in Britain, we see traces of such primeval dif- 

 ferentiation. The naked or skin-clad savages, who then hid among 

 the caves of southeastern England, were ignorant of all the metals, as 

 well as of pottery, and only employed rudely chipped weapons of un- 

 ground flint. The neighboring forests then contained the mammoth 

 and the woolly rhinoceros, the urus and the musk-ox, while the hippo- 

 potamus still basked on the banks of the Ouse and the Thames. But 

 man appears at that period to have been wholly confined to the south- 

 eastern corner of England, from the coast of Devonshire to that of 

 Lincoln. This district roughly coincides with that in which he could 

 obtain flints for the manufacture of his weapons ; and it also comprises 

 the most level portion of Britain, where he might find comparative 

 security and well-stocked hunting-grounds among the low-lying jungles 

 of the eastern counties, the Thames Valley, and the tertiary plains of 

 Hampshire. He does not seem at this early age to have ventured 

 among the wild primary hills of Cornwall, Wales, the Pennine chain, 

 and the Scottish Highlands, but rather to have clung about the river- 

 fisheries and the flat shores of the southeast. Perhaps the bare and 

 treeless chalk downs whicb run from Beer in Devonshire to the Norfolk 



