46 
district of Hampshire with the greatest diligence and intelligence ; and 
Mr. G. Scott explained that their Hon. Secretary wishing to bring the 
subject before the Society for discussion, had selected him (Mr. 8.) for 
a task for which he (Mr. Wonfor) would have been himself admirably 
qualified. 
First glancing at the doubts which had arisen as to the genuineness 
of these implements, owing both to the fraudulent fabrication of them 
and to the production of fracture in flint by natural causes, Mr. 
Scott said, ‘‘ No one questions the human origin and use of the highly 
finished stone weapons of latter ages ; and the acutest minds have for 
years been devoting the most careful research, and the most critical 
attention to those of ruder times ; with the result, which it would be 
presumptuous to question, that, in far remote ages, men made the 
rudely chipped weapons which are found in cave and den, embedded 
in gravel, or strewn in places on the surface, and used them, to the 
exclusion of metal and of polished weapons, in war, in the chase, and 
in all the various needs of domestic life.” 
For a moment the thought might arise, ‘‘ Was this a subject for the 
Natural History Society to take up at all?” But they saw at once that 
it was when they considered that Flint was one of the most important 
substances in Nature, and one of the most interesting with which the 
naturalist had to do; and when they remembered further that these 
rude weapons lead them back to that point at which Geology 
and Archceology touched and then diverged. Indeed, these im- 
plements formed the legitimate starting-point of enquiry -into 
the earliest condition of man upon the earth,-as apart from the 
Darwinian speculation, for which there was no fragment of proof ; and 
to abandon this enquiry was to lose the only chance they had of knowing 
anything of the earliest races of Europe and of the evidences that 
man was living along with the mammoth, the cave bear, and the 
woolly-haired rhinoceros. 
Adopting the division of the early human period into the Age of 
Stone, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Iron, the first age might be 
divided into the period of the Drift (or Palozolithic period), when man 
shared the possession of Europe with the later extinct animals, and the 
Neolithic period, when beautifully-formed and polished weapons, — some 
of them bored as if by the lathe,—were found, but with no trace of the 
use of metals, except occasionally gold for ornaments. 
