PHYSICAL ETHNOLOGY. 293 



from the study of tlie palseosoic rocks to the recent sedimentary cave deposits 

 and the superficial drift. The investigations of British archaeologists, following 

 in the footsteps of their northern precursors, have now familiarized us with the 

 character of that primitive art so widely diffused throughout those ages embraced 

 within the European Stone Period. That age of stone derives its special 

 characteristic from the occurrence of numerous examples of arms and implements 

 of flint or stone, many of which are wrought with considerable skill and finished 

 with minute care. Others, however, are sufficiently rude and unshaped to illus- 

 trate the most artless efforts of primitive mechanical skill. These are formed 

 from flint nodules and pieces of rock by mere blows from another stone, guided, 

 in the case of the flint-workers, by a knowledge of the concoidal fracture of the 

 flint and the consequent facility of its reduction to long and narrow splinters, 

 readily convertible into wedges, chisels, knives, and lance or arrow heads. The 

 simplest implements of this class are frequently water-worn stones, partially 

 hewn, so as to reduce one end to a sharp or angular edge. But, while speci- 

 mens of such rudimentary art are not uncommon, many more are chipped into 

 symmetrical form with minute care and are ground to a fine edge, or even 

 wrought into artistic forms and polished throughout the whole surface. To those 

 it has been customary with many to apply the epithet Celtic, and so to assume 

 their origin from that people who immediately preceded the Romans in the scenes 

 of their latest European conquests. This, however, is rather an assumption 

 than any well-grounded induction; and, though revived by M. Boucher de 

 Perthes in his Antiquites Celtique et Antcd'duviennes, (1849,) had been previ- 

 ously set aside by Thomsen, Worsaac, Nilsson, and other Scandinavian archje- 

 ologists, and, at the very time, was challenged in a communication submitted 

 by me to the ethnological section of the British Association, entitled : An Inquiry 

 into the Evidence of' Primitive Races in Scotland prior to the Celta* But that 

 which was a bold surmise in 1850 seems an insignificant and self-evident truism 

 in the light of the well-established facts, and cautious yet comprehensive induc- 

 tions, relative to the flint implements found in the same drift of England and 

 Erance alongside of bones of the Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichor- 

 hinus, Equus fossil IS, Felis spclaia. Hyena spelcca, and numerous other extinct 

 mammals. 



The facts connected with the discovery of works of human art associated 

 in undisturbed gravel with the fossil bones of extinct quadrupeds, or in corres- 

 ponding diluvial strata both of Erance and England, are now too well known 

 to need recapitulation. It is indeed a significant fact that some of them have 

 been long familiar to British antiquaries, though the true bearings of their dis- 

 covery are only now beginning to be recognized. So early as 1715, a weapon 

 of flint, six and a half inches long, and rudely chipped into the form of a spear- 

 head, was dug up at Black Mary's, near Gray's Inn Lane, London, along with 

 an elephant's tooth, and apparently lying beside the entire skeleton of a fossil 

 elephant.t This curious evidence of the remote presence of man in the most 

 populous centre of his modern civic settlements lay unheeded in the collections 

 of the British Museum for nearly a century and a half. Meanwhile, towards 

 the close of the eighteenth century, another remarkable discovery of the same 

 kind was made at Hoxne, in Sufiblk, in gravel at a depth of twelve feet in a 

 stratified soil, and immediately underneath a horizontal bed of sand mixed with 

 shells of existing fresh-water and land mollusca, «nd Avith gigantic fossil bones. 

 An account of this discovery was commnnlcated by Mr. John Erere to the 

 Society of Antiquaries of London in I797,|iind specimens of the flint imple- 

 ments were deposited in the society's museum, where they are still preserved. 



It is interesting and highly satisfactory to know that not only had such facts 



* British Association Report, 1850, p. 144. 

 tArclisBologia, Vol. XXXVIII, p. 301. 

 X Ibid, Vol. XIII, p. 204. 



