I. VALLEY OF PYDEL AND BUCKLAND NEWTON. 



Dorset downs. Mr. Gould, to whom he had sent some photo- 

 graphs of those enclosures, told him that they took him back to 

 an extremely remote age. The oldest remains of man in this 

 country belonged to the Drift period, a period long before the 

 separation of Great Britain from the Continent. There were no 

 remains of that period in this part of the country, but they were 

 found in several of the caverns at Torquay, Brixham, and else- 

 where. In that district they had many remains of the next 

 oldest inhabitants the long-headed men, known generally as 

 the Iberian race, from the peculiar shape of their skulls. They 

 buried their dead in long-shaped barrows, of which he should 

 have the opportunity of showing one later in the day. And the 

 long-headed men were divided into distinct epochs the 

 Palaeolithic and the Neolithic. The Palaeolithic epoch was 

 so-called because the men of that age used implements 

 of the oldest and most barbarous kind. They did not dig for 

 their flints, but they picked them up on the surface, and knocked 

 them rudely into shape. Then, after a long interval probably, 

 came the Neolithic division of those people, who discovered 

 that they could make better weapons if they dug for their 

 flints, and there were to be seen the remains of many pits 

 in which they quarried for their flints in the most accessible 

 and appropriate spots. After Neolithic man came the Celtic 

 stock belonging to the Aryan division of mankind, and they, 

 again, were divided into two groups first the Goidels and 

 then the Britons proper, the Brythonic race, who gradually 

 drove the Goidels into corners of the west country in Wales and 

 Cornwall, just as in later days they themselves were driven by the 

 Saxons. Professor Rhys had lately suggested, what seemed a 

 palpable fact, that the word " British " could be traced to a root 

 meaning "wearing woven clothes," whereas the most ancient 

 people the Neolithic and Palaeolithic races, and probably also 

 the Goidelic dressed almost entirely in skins, which accounted 

 for the enormous number of flints fashioned into scrapers for the 

 purpose of scraping and preparing the skins for their clothing. 

 As far as Roman remains were concerned, he knew nothing of 



