112 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



indeed, but armed only with roughly-chipped stone implements, and 

 wholly ignorant of taming animals, or of the very rudiments of agri- 

 culture. He knew nothing of the use of metals aiirum irrepertum 

 spernere fortior and he had not even learned how to grind and polish 

 his rude stone tomahawks to a finished edge. He couldn't make him- 

 self a bowl of sun-baked pottery, and if he had discovered the almost 

 universal art of manufacturing an intoxicating liquor from grain or 

 berries (for, as Byron, with too great anthropological truth, justly re- 

 marks, "man, being reasonable, must get drunk") he at least drank his 

 aboriginal beer or toddy from the capacious horn of a slaughtered 

 aurochs. That was the kind of human being who alone inhabited 

 France and England during the later pre-Glacial period. 



A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put 

 it), and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man 

 meanwhile, loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa 

 (as yet imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the 

 important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made 

 pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice-sheet cleared 

 away he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, an- 

 other man, physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow ac- 

 cumulations of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes 

 the words ! how hard to realize them !) upon his maturer shoulders. 

 Then comes the age of what older antiquaries used to regard as primi- 

 tive antiquity the age of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen- 

 middens, of the Swiss lake-dwellings. The men who lived in it had 

 domesticated the dog, the cow, the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable 

 pig ; they had begun to sow small ancestral wheat and undeveloped 

 barley ; they had learned to weave flax and wear decent clothing ; in 

 a word, they had passed from the savage hunting condition to the 

 stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists. That is a comparative- 

 ly modern period, and yet I suppose we must conclude, with Dr. James 

 Geikie, that it isn't to be measured by mere calculations of ten or 

 twenty centuries, but ten or twenty thousand years. The perspective 

 of the past is opening up rapidly before us ; what looked quite close 

 yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere in the dim dis- 

 tance. Like our palaeolithic artists, we fail to get the reindeer fairly 

 behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we saw the 

 whole scene properly foreshortened. 



On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving 

 from the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which 

 this article is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint 

 hatchet, produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dex- 

 terous blows, and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It 

 belongs to the age of the very old master (or possibly even to a slight- 

 ly earlier epoch), and it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that 

 indefatigable uneartber of prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Har- 



