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pieces of flint about three or four inches long, sphtting it with stone wedges, 

 scraping it with flint flakes. Some are at work preparing handles for the 

 spears, shafts for the arrows, and wood for the bows, or for the broad paddles 

 used for propelling the canoes. Others are busy grinding and sharpening the 

 various stone tools, scraping skins with implements ground to a circular edge, 

 or carving various implements out of bone and antler with sharp splinters of 

 flint, while the women are preparing the meal with pestles and mortars and 

 grain rubbers, and cooking it on the fire, generally outside the house, or spinning 

 thread with spindle and distaff", or weaving it with a rude loom. We might also 

 have seen them at work at the moulding of ritde cups and vessels out of clay which 

 had been carefidly prepared. 



From this you will see that Professor Dawkins considers that 

 these long-headed neolithic men knew how to make pottery. 



He describes their vessels as coarsely made by hand, and 

 composed of clay, in which small pieces of stone, or frag- 

 ments of shell, have been worked. They are brown or black 

 in colour, and very generally have had rounded bottoms ; from 

 which it may be inferred that they were not intended to stand on 

 tables, but were placed in hollows on the ground or the floor. 

 Sometimes they are ornamented with patterns of lines or dots. 

 And in these rude, ill-baked vessels, you have the germs of an 

 art which has culminated in the finely modelled and exquisitely 

 painted vases of the Etruscan Greeks; the majolica ware of Italy; 

 the stone ware of Flanders and of Germany ; the porcelain of 

 China and of Dresden; and of many other famous "fabriques" 

 and "bottegas" which I have neither the time nor the knowledge 

 to enumerate, or to instruct you to distinguish between. 



I shall confine myself to the four great divisions into which the 

 history of the Ceramic art of this country is to be divided — The 

 Celtic, The Romano-British, The Anglo-Saxon, and The Mediceval. 



The Celtic Age. 



The greater part of the pottery that has come down from the 

 Celtic age is sepulchral in character, and it is divided into four 

 classes, which have been named "cinerary urns," "incense cups," 

 "food vessels," and "drinking cups." Now, it should be noticed 

 that all these four classes differ in a marked manner from the 



