PREHISTORIC RECORDS. 545 



indicates clearly that the moon-sun story came from India before the 

 Komany could have obtained any Greek name. And, if the Romany 

 call themselves Jengan, or Chenkan, or Zin-gan, in the East, it is ex- 

 tremely unlikely that they ever received such a name from the Gorgios 

 in Europe. — Saturday Review. 



PKEHISTORIC RECORDS. 



THE caves, tombs, and gravel-drifts of the earth, which are of all 

 objects the most uninteresting to the casual observer, have in our 

 days become strangely eloquent. At the touch of science they have 

 lent a voice to the dumb past. Raising the veil of antiquity, they 

 have unrolled page after page of ancient history, written neither with 

 pen nor pencil, but stamped on the rude implements of war or the 

 chase, imprinted on the few threads of decaying tissue that inwrap the 

 crumbling skeleton, engraved on the bracelet of bronze or silver that 

 encircled the slender wrist of some prehistoric beauty, or chased on 

 the brooch of gold that clasped the mantle of some renowned but for- 

 gotten chieftain. 



So exact are the deductions to be drawn from these mute records 

 of the past that they have been divided by Sir John Lubbock, in his 

 " Prehistoric Times," into four well-defined ages — the drift age, the age 

 of polished stone, the age of bronze, and the age of iron ; each of these 

 marking an advance in knowledge and civilization which amounted 

 to a revolution in the then existing manners and customs of the 

 world. The drift age or Paleolithic period is marked by deposits of 

 rude stone implements ; to it succeeds the Neolithic, or age of polished 

 stone, in which the same stone implements were in use, but of a supe- 

 rior class, highly polished and well finished. 



The wandering savage who lived by the chase and cut up his prey 

 with the rude, unpolished flint knives of the Paleolithic age was coeval 

 with many extinct animals which then ranged over the wide forests 

 that in those early times covered our own country in common with 

 many portions of the Continent. In the caves of Derbyshire and else- 

 where, many of the rudely chipped knives and arrow-heads of these 

 ancient hunters are found, the rudest occupying the lowest strata ; 

 showing that even in that remote age man had the same tendency to 

 improve as now, and that the practice of even these rude germs of art 

 led to a gradual perfecting of them. Some of the remains of the an- 

 cient Nimrods of that remote and, but for these stone records, unwrit- 

 ten age have been found in caves and sepulchral tumuli ; and of all 

 the living races of men they resemble the Esquimaux most closely. 

 With them are found the remains of such extinct animals as the cave- 



