ON THE STONE AGE. 61 



lapetus. By a reverse process of evolution from the lower to higher stages, the 

 anthropoid, or Caliban of archsBological science, becomes the tool-maker, the tool-user, 

 and in the same primitive stage, the fire-maker. But the service of fire is required by 

 man under the most varied conditions of life. The stone lamp with its moss wick, and 

 the stone kettle, are important implements in the snow-hut of the Eskimo. On those he 

 depends, not only for cooking, but for his supply of water from melted snow ; and with- 

 out the lighted taper of his stone lamp the indoor life of the long, unbroken arctic night 

 would be passed in a rayless dungeon. He has inherited the knowledge of the palteo- 

 lithic fire-maker, from whom, indeed, some have claimed for him direct geuealogicnl 

 descent ; and he generally treasures among his most useful appliances a piece of quartz, 

 and a nodule of pyrites, which constitute his Hint and steel. At the remote extreme of 

 the southern continent the same precious bequest is in use by the Fuegians and Patagon- 

 ians of Terra del Fuego, the name of which is a memorial of its fire-using savages. The 

 Fuegian makes a hearth of clay in the bottom of his rudely constructed bark canoe, on 

 which he habitually keeps a fire burning. He prepares a tinder of dried moss or fungus, 

 which is readily ignited by the spark struck from a flinty stone by means of a pyrites. 

 The invaluable discovery is shared by the lowest races. The Australian, the Andaman 

 Islander, and other rudest tribes of the Old and the New World, possess the same great 

 secret, and turn it to useful account. 



The tradition may have been perpetuated from generation to generation from the 

 remotest dawn of human reason ; or it may have been re-disco verpd independently among 

 diverse races. But wherever the value of the pyrites in evoking the latent spiik of the 

 flint was known, it would be a coveted prize, and a valuable object of barter. The story 

 of the old fire-makers is recorded still in the charcoal ashes of many an ancient hearth ; for 

 charcoal is one of the most indestructible of substances when buried. In the famous 

 Kent's Hole limestone cavern at Torbay, Devonshire, explorers have systematically pur- 

 sued research backward from the specifically dated stalagmitic record of " Robert Hodges, 

 of Ireland, Feb. 20, 1688," through Saxon, Roman, British, and Neolithic strata, to the 

 deposit where human remains lay embedded alongside of those of the woolly rhinoceros, 

 the mammoth, the fossil horse, the hyena and cave bear. There also lay, not only the 

 finished implements, but the flakes and flint cores that revealed the workshop of the 

 primitive tool-maker, and the charcoal that preserved the traces of his ancient fire. So, 

 too, in the Cromagnon rock-shelter of the Perigord, in an upper valley of the Garonne, 

 repeated layers of charcoal, interspersed with broken bones and other culinary remains 

 of the ancient cave-dwellers, tell of the knowledge and use of fire by palœolithic man, 

 in western Europe's Reindeer and Mammoth ages. Compared with such disclosures of 

 the arts and knowledge of primeval man, the discoveries on which the Danish archoeo- 

 logists based their systematising of prehistoric remains belong, geologically speaking, to 

 modern eras. Denmark is underlaid essentially by Upper Cretaceous rocks, the Etage 

 Dauien of most French writers, and the Faxoe Kelke of German geologists. Drift clays 

 and gravels overlie the cretaceous rocks in many places, with more recent deposits of 

 sands, gravels, etc. These latter are of Neolithic age, containing bones only of existing 

 mammals. Palaeolithic deposits, with bones of extinct species, do not appear to have been 

 recognized in Denmark ; nor is there any trace of the presence of palœolithic man. 

 Hence the field alike of Danish antiquarian research and archseological speculation was 



