106 BULLETIN OF THE LIVERPOOL MUSEUMS. 
imperishable tools and weapons out of. The earliest of these, the age during 
which man used stone implements, presents two epochs—an older (Paleolithic) 
and a newer (Neolithic) period. 
The characters of the paleolithic implements are nodules of flint (chiefly), 
or quartzite rudely chipped into invariably unpolished scrapers, tongue- 
shaped instruments, hammers, and other tools. They are glossy of surface, 
smooth-edged, and patinated by the weather or chemical changes in the 
beds where they have reposed. They have been preserved to our day by 
being, without exception, buried under the (often stalagmitic) floors of the 
caves in which their makers sheltered, dwelt, or worked ; or under the mud 
accumulated over their workshops by lake-inundations ; or beneath the drift 
gravels left in the course of fresh water streams into which their handiwork 
had been washed by floods. In association with these implements are found 
the remains of animals which have for ages been extinct or have long 
vanished from their former haunts. The sites in which they are found in 
England indicate that they were deposited at a time when our island was still 
united to a larger Ireland, and was undissevered by the North Sea and the 
English Channel from the Continent of Europe, and when the latter was united 
to Northern Africa—a period distant from ours estimated by some geologists 
at tens, and by others at hundreds, of thousands of years. 
The implements of the neolithic time show a great advance in the science 
and art of the fabrication of flint. Many of them are highly artistic in form, 
being beautifully worked and often finished to a rich polish. They are 
nearly always found on the surface of the ground on the floors of the 
undisturbed caves which the man of the period occupied, and in the kitchen 
middens in front of them ; or in the refuse heaps accumulated under the pile 
dwellings he occupied on the margin of lakes, or in graves entombed beside 
his bones. If found buried, however, they are always in beds which indicate 
that in the time of these inhabitants the country presented practically the 
same topographical features, and contained the same fauna that it does to-day. 
In Europe neolithic man lived in the present, and paleolithic man in the 
previous, or Pleistocene, geological period. 
The existence of flint mines and workshops in the eastern desert of 
Egypt—if known to the Bedawin—has been buried in oblivion so far as any 
Egyptian traveller, explorer, or archeologist is concerned, since the ancient 
date, when they were, perhaps precipitately, deserted by the quarrymen and 
artificers, till they were re-discovered by Mr Seton-Karr.* There. exists, 
therefore, so far as I have been able to gather, neither legend nor tradition in 
regard to them. We have, consequently, no help in this direction as to the 
age of the implements or the mines. 
The shade of discolouration, or the patina, and the amount of wear which 
the surface of the flint exhibits, are among the criteria which archzologists 
appeal to in estimating the age of stone implements. “The safest and, 
indeed, the most common indication,” says Sir John Evans, “ of an implement 
being really genuine is the alteration in the structure of the flints . . and 
the discolouration it has undergone.” 

*Mr. Greg, in a paper in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, in 1881, men- 
tions the great abundance of flakes of flint over an extent of some miles on the tableland 
on the east side of the Nile opposite Feshn. It is remarkable that no one in the 
intervening fifteen years should have visited the adjoining Wady, or recorded 
occurrence of implements which apparently abound in such large numbers there. I have 
it from Mr. Seton-Karr that Johnson Pasha seems to have observed some of the mines 
in passing across this very region many years ago, as well as to have picked up on the 
ground a few implements, now all lost, with the exception of one which has been 
figured by Mr. Seton-Karr in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. xxvii. 
pl. x. fig. 2; but that he gave the excavations no careful examination, as he was led 
to believe that the workings had been made by Arabs in search of gold. 
