Prehistoric Horses of Eiiroj)e. 91 



behind them a collection of engravings and sculptures which 

 bear a favourable comparison with analogous productions 

 of the present day. But of agricultural operations, the 

 rearing of domestic animals, the principles of religion, and 

 the arts of spinning, weaving, and making pottery, they 

 appear to have been absolutely ignorant. On the other 

 hand, the Neolithic inhabitants of the same regions culti- 

 vated fruits, wheat, barley, and other cereals ; they reared in 

 a state of domestication oxen, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, and 

 dogs ; they were skilled in the ceramic art, and manufactured 

 cloth by spinning and weaving wool and fibrous textures ; 

 they ground their stone implements and tools, so as to give 

 them sharp-cutting edges ; in hunting wild animals they 

 used the bow and arrows, the latter being tipped with a 

 sharp piece of flint; they built houses both for the living 

 and for the dead, and their religious ideas were highly 

 developed. But of the artistic taste and skill of their pre- 

 decessors they had not a vestige, and whatever they did, by 

 way of ornament, consisted of a few linear scratches arranged 

 in some simple geometrical figures. The fundamental prin- 

 ciples of these two civilisations are so incompatible that the 

 Neolithic in its most flourishing stage, such as we see it 

 among the lake-dwellers of Switzerland, cannot be regarded 

 as a local derivation from the latest phase of the Palaeolithic, 

 without the application of some strong moulding influences 

 of external origin. The former had therefore its birth and 

 early growth in outside areas, and it is quite probable that, 

 while the isolated reindeer hunters of Central Europe were 

 still in existence, people elsewhere were already passing 

 through the evolutionary stages which connected the two 

 civilisations to the common stem line of human progress, 

 and enabled an increasing population to live under the 

 changed conditions of their environment. 



For a long time archaeologists could ofl*er no better ex- 

 planation of the striking contrast between the two civilisations 

 than by supposing that they had been separated by a long 

 interval of time — a hiatus — during which Western Europe 

 ceased to be inhabited. But this idea is now generally 

 discarded, and already what seems to be a true epoch of 



