32 transactions. — Misceltaneoits. 



flint or of chert, rest pSle-m$le with hone needles, sculptured 

 reindeer antlers, engraved stones, arrow-heads, harpoons and 

 pointed bones, and with the broken remains of the animals 

 which had been used as food — the reindeer, bison, horse, the 

 ibex, the saiga antelope, and the musk sheep. In some cases 

 the whole is compacted, by a calcareous cement, into a hard 

 mass, fragments of which are to be seen in the principal 

 museums of Europe. This strange accumulation of debris 

 marks, beyond all doubt, the place where ancient hunters had 

 feasted, and the broken bones and implements are merely the 

 refuse cast aside. The reindeer formed by far the larger por- 

 tion of the food, and must have lived in enormous herds 

 in the centre of France. The severity of the climate at that 

 time may be inferred by the presence of this animal, as well as 

 by the accumulation of bones in the spots on which man had 

 fixed his habitation. Indeed, had this not been the case, the 

 decomposition of so much animal matter would have rendered 

 the place uninhabitable even by the lowest savage." 



These facts do indeed afford a vivid picture of the life condi- 

 tions under which man existed at a time unquestionably separated 

 from the present age by countless centuries, and that too, in parts 

 of Europe which now sustain a rich and varied vegetation, and 

 in which, except the horse, all the animals above referred to 

 are now extinct and are replaced by herds of domesticated oxen 

 and deer, by flocks of sheep and goats, and by numerous other 

 animals maintained either for their profit or for their beauty. 



It must be manifest that during this earlier period the human 

 inhabitants could have derived as little of their nutriment from 

 vegetable substances, as do the Esquimaux and Samoyeds of the 

 present day, and that it is more than probable they devoured, 

 with the same greedy relish as the former, the partly digested 

 matter found in the stomachs of the ruminants upon the flesh of 

 which they chiefly subsisted. Had they possessed any of the 

 vegetable foods which, as we shall find in the sequel, were 

 abundantly consumed by the Neolithic men by whom they were 

 succeeded, some remnants of such food would unquestionably have 

 been discovered amongst the debris of their feasts, by the scientific 

 observers who so fully and closely examined those debris : and the 

 complete absence of any such remnants, not only justifies us in 

 assuming that they did not possess foods of the lands referred 

 to, but also serves to strengthen the view expressed above as to 

 the nature of the contemporaneous climatal conditions. 



A great advance in the vegetable food available for man in 

 Western Europe is found to have taken place in Neolithic times. 

 We have no means of estimating the length of the interval which 

 separated even the later Paleolithic from that part of the Neo- 

 lithic period to which 1 am about to refer, but the geological 

 evidence alone indicates that it must have been enormous, that 



