33 
THE FORMATION OF CUMBERLAND. 
(Read at Cockermouth and Carlisle. ) 
By R. S. FERGUSON, M.A., LL.M., F.S.A. 
[This lecture is the abbreviation of several papers intended as the intro- 
ductory chapters of the writer’s forthcoming History of Cumberland. In those 
papers the writer has given the name (with references) of every author cited or 
consulted by him. In compressing them into an hour's lecture (the publication 
of which the writer did not anticipate or desire), the writer, for clearness and 
brevity, omitted such names and references. The lecture is now published, as 
delivered, at request of the Carlisle Scientific Society and Naturalists’ Field 
Club. ] 
I propose to-night to try and give you some idea of who 
dwelt in this county of Cumberland before it had that name; 
what those people have to do-with us, who dwell in it now; and 
how our county came to be separated from others and have a 
name of its own. 
To begin at the beginning, I dare say some of you have heard, 
in this very room, Mr. Clifton Ward describe tersely and clearly, 
as he well can, the geological changes that this district has gone 
through ; you may have, as I, heard him describe how, as in a 
vision, his mind’s eye saw those successive changes, and how 
this country was once united by dry land to the Continent of 
Europe, across which, as across a bridge, came various animals of 
forms strange to us--the mammoth, the woolly elephant, the hairy 
rhinoceros, the cave hyena, the cave bear, and with them possibly 
Man. 
Thus would begin in these Islands what is called “The Stone 
Age,” or period when man was ignorant of the use of metal, and 
his only implements for war, for the chase, or for domestic use, 
were of Stone, bone, or shell. The men of the Stone age have left no 
histories behind them: for what we know of them we are indebted 
