62 SIE DANIEL WILSON , 



greatly circumscribed. But thus precluded from the study of primitive arts iu that vagvie 

 Palaeolithic dawn which lies outside of the speculations of the historian, and from any 

 resort to classical authorities for evidence in the interpretation of local disclosures, the 

 Danish antiquary escaped the temptation to many misleading assumptions which long 

 perplexed the archœologists of France and England ; and so his limited range has tended 

 to facilitate the investigations into subsequent disclosures relative to the antiquity of 

 man and his arts. 



Within the old Roman provinces of western Europe, the Latin conquerors were not 

 Duly accredited with whatever showed any trace of Hellenic or Roman art, but with the 

 sole skill in working in iron. The Dane and Northman were assumed to have followed 

 in their wake with bronze, as with runes and other essentially non-classical products ; 

 though still the beautiful leaf-shaped sword and other choicest relics of the Bronze age 

 were not infrequently ascribed to the Romans. But i^hilologists had not yet assigned a 

 place to the Celtic in the Aryan family of languages. The Celt was not only assumed to 

 be the barbarous precursor, alike of Roman and Dane, but to be the primeval man of 

 western Europe. Hence when the first hoards of palaeolithic flint implements were acci- 

 dentally discovered in Sussex and Kent, their Celtic or British origin was assumed with- 

 out question. But the known historic position of the Northman on Scandinavian soil 

 prevented the crude application of the term " Danish" to every bronze relic found there ; 

 and as no Roman conqueror had trodden the soil of Denmark, the ethnology as well as the 

 archaeology of the region was left unaffected by complexities resulting from the presence 

 of the Romans in Gaul and Britain. The absence of remains of palaeolithic man still 

 further simplified the problem ; while the geology of the Danish peninsula favoured 

 the neolithic tool-maker. Flint abounds there in amorphous nodules or blocks, and the 

 nuclei, or cores, from which a succession of flakes have been struck, are of frequent occur- 

 rence among the relics of the Danish Stone age. Flint is no less abundant throughout 

 the regions of France and England, on either side of the English Channel ; and there, 

 accordingly, alike in the caves and the river-drift, the rude, massive flint implements of 

 the Palaeolithic era abound. 



The natural cleavage of flint, as also of the obsidian found in certain localities in 

 the Old and New World, so readily adapts both materials to the manufacture of knives, 

 lances, and arrow-heads, that they appear to have been turned to account by the tool- 

 maker from the dawn of rudest art. But it must not be overlooked that obsidian is 

 limited to volcanic regions, and flint is no more universally available than bronze or iron. 

 In some countries it is rare ; in still more it is entirely wanting; and yet its peculiar apti- 

 tude for tool-making appears to have been recognized at the earliest jieriod ; so that imple- 

 ments and weapons of flint, alike of the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic age, abound in 

 many localities where the raw material of the tool-maker is unknown. 



It was only natural that the systematic study and classification of the manufactures 

 of the ancient workers in flint should be first carried out in regions such as the Danish 

 peninsula, geologically related to the Cretaceous period, and abounding in the material 

 which most readily adapts itself to the requirements of an implement-maker ignorant of 

 the arts of metallurgy. But the same inexhaustible store of raw material was available 

 to the " Flint-folk" whose implements have become so familiar by reason of more recent 

 disclosures of France and England belonging to a period when the climate, the physical 



