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of the division of time into the stone, the bronze, and the iron 

 ages. In the first of these, man was ignorant of the use of metal, 

 and his only implements for war, for the chase, or for domestic 

 use, were of wood, stone, bone, or shell. To this followed the 

 bronze age, when man had advanced to the knowledge of weapons 

 and implements of bronze ; these did not wholly supersede stone 

 weapons and implements, for the poor man would continue to use 

 the cheaper articles. Next ensued the iron age. 



The stone age is again subdivided into two periods, — the earlier 

 or pateolithic age, when man did not know how to grind or polish 

 a stone, but only how to rudely chip it to a rough edge — the later 

 or neolithic, when man knew how to grind and polish a stone. 

 The pateolithic age is again subdivided into two, the age of the 

 river-drift man and of the cave-man. 



The river-drift man lived at a period when the whole of 

 this island, including Ireland, as well also as great part of 

 the North Sea, was dry land, and part and parcel of the 

 continent of Europe. His remains have been found not only 

 in southern Britain, but throughout western and southern Europe, 

 northern Africa, Asia Minor, and India, a distribution which makes 

 it certain his age — the age of the river-drift man — was one of 

 great length. But he was a mere hunter, armed with rude stone 

 implements : he had no pottery, or we should have found his 

 potsherds, for they are as little liable to destruction as a fragment 

 of bone or of antler. The river-drift man was the contemporary 

 here in the winter of the reindeer, the lemming, and the musk- 

 sheep. In the spring, summer, and the autumn, he could here 

 hunt the stag, the bison, the urus, the pouched marmot, the 

 woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the wild boar, and the hare ; 

 but the lion and the spotted hyaena hunted him. He was a man, 

 endowed with all human attributes ; he was not a monkey, or an 

 ape, though both English and French professors have suggested 

 that in the meiocene age some of the higher apes in France could 

 chip flints, and cut bones. 



The river-drift man has perished entirely : he is as extinct as 

 as the mammoth or the dodo. 



