ON THE STONE AGE. 63 



geography, and the whole animal life of western Europe, contrasted in every respect with 

 anything we have knowledge of in remotest historic times. Those rude examples of 

 primitive art lie alongside of the unwrought flint in such profusion that the examples 

 of them already accumulated in the museums of Europe and America, amount to many 

 thousands. But now that attention has been thus widely drawn to their character and 

 significance, it is found that implements of the same class not only abound in regions 

 geologically favorable to their production, but they occur in nearly every country in 

 Europe, and on widely scattered localities in Asia and Africa, wher<^ no such natural 

 resources were available for their manufacture. 



The earliest known type of primitiA^e Hint implements, illustrative of a class now 

 very familiar to archa-ologists, was accidentally recoA'^ered from the Quaternary gravel 

 beds of the Thames A'alley, in the heart of Old London, before the close of the seventeenth 

 century. It is a well made spear-pointed implement, with an unusually taperiug point, 

 while the butt-eud is broad and roughly fashioned so that it could be used in the hand 

 as a spade or hoe without any haft. The deposit in which it lay would now be accepted 

 as unquestionable evidence of its Palœocosmic age ; but at the date of its discovery, the 

 Celtic era was regarded as that to which all oldest traces of European man pertained. 

 This interesting relic is accordingly described in the Sloane Catalogue of the British 

 Museum as " a British weapon, found with elephanfs tooth, opposite to Black Mary's, 

 near Gray's Inn Lane." In 179*7, another and highly interesting discovery of the same 

 class was communicated to the Society of Antiquaries of London by one of its members, 

 Mr. John Erere.' In this case a large number of palœoliths were found lying at a 

 depth of twelve feet from the surface, in a gravelly soil containing fresh-water shells 

 and bones of great size. Subsequent excavations in the same locality, at Hoxne, Suffolk, 

 confirm the presence there of the bones of the mammoth, as well as of the fossil horse 

 and the deer. Mr. Frere was so strongly impressed with the evidence of anticjuity 

 supplied that he inclined to assign the implements to a remote age, " even beyond that 

 of the present world." By this, however, he probably meant no more than M. Boucher 

 de Perthes, when, so recently as 184*7, he entitled his volume devoted to the correspond- 

 ing discoveries in the valley of the Somme, " Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes." 

 The antiquity of man, as now understood, was then uuthought of; and the word 

 " antediluvian" sufhced as a A^ague expression of remote indefinite antiquity for which 

 ■pre-Celtic would then have been accepted as an equivalent. Mr. Frere speaks of the flint 

 implements as " e^ddently weapons of war fabricated and used by a people who had not 

 the use of metals." He further adds : " The manner in which they lie would lead to the 

 persuasion that it was a place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit ; 

 and the numbers of them were so great that the man who carried on the brick-work told 

 me that before he was aware of their being objects of curiosity he had emptied baskets 

 full of them into the ruts of the adjoining road."' 



When, in December, 188G, Mr. J. Allan Brown communicated to the same Society an 

 analogous discoA'^ery near Ealing, Middlesex, English archœologists had become so familiar 

 with the idea of the antiquity of palaeolithic man, and the arts of his epoch, that the exist- 

 ence of pre-Celtic races in Britain was accepted as a mere truism. It was not, therefore, 



' Archœologia, xiii. 204. '' Ibid., xiii. 224, 225 ; pi. xiv, xv. 



