ih gaia ata ail 
— [j— 
animals, he could have trusted only to swiftness and cunning’ 
for his safety ; no covering but. the skins of the smaller ani- 
mals he was enabled to catch and devour raw. Such must 
have been the first appearance of man on the earth} soon, 
however, would his superior intelligence begin to assert itself. 
His first attempt at self defence would be some knotted club. 
He would then see, strewing the ground, the sharp flints which 
now served only to wound his naked feet. The first step to 
all arts, manufactures, and civilisation was made when the first 
man struck the first blow in a crude attempt to fashion some 
rough weapon from a flint! A jagged flint wedged in a cleft 
stick would soon supersede the club and enable him to attack 
animals more powerful than himself; his next step in advance 
was kindling a fire, though at what period he first learnt to 
do, or by what means he succeeded, we can never know, pro- 
bably in the same way as some savage tribes in the present 
day, by rubbing together two dry sticks. As this way is 
tedious and uncertain, he must have endeavoured, as do 
modern savages, to keep the flame burning by supplies of 
resinons wood, &c., though it would probably uot occur to him 
to adopt the ingenious device of the Faroe islanders, which is 
to draw a wick through the body of the Stormy Petrel (a bird 
containing a large per centage of fat) and light the end which 
is left projecting at the beak! Primitive Man must soon have 
attained great perfection in the only mechanism he practised, 
namely fashioning tools and weapons of stone, for flint knives, 
hatchets, spearheads, and arrow heads are found in enormous 
numbers wherever pre-historic remains are met with. Pottery 
was, probably, the next art learnt, for fragments of vessels, 
rough and rude, with the marks of the primeval maker’s fingers 
still on them, were discovered in the cave of Nabuges, by the 
side of a skull pierced with a flint arrow head, and other 
remains. Caves were evidently used as shelter by these our 
remote ancestors, probably after they had been evacuated by 
their first tenants, which were hyzenas, bears, &c.; and they 
were also used as burial places, one of which was recently 
discovered in France containing no less than 17 bodies, which 
the over-zealous Mayor of Aurignac unfortunately ordered to 
be buried in the parish churchyard, and they were thus for ever 
lost to science! Were the men of the Stone Age cannibals ? 
