104 THE LAPSE OF TIME. 



their own children, even when they are no more than 

 four or five 1 . 



From these considerations alone we may feel perfectly 

 certain that numbers of ages elapsed before men acquired 

 the means of recording the duration of time by any 

 definite measurements. Unconsciously and without set 

 purpose, perhaps the very earliest tribes and the most 

 untutored have left behind them traces not only of their 

 existence but of the date and era at which they lived ; 

 traces which we are only now beginning to decipher, 

 and to read with faltering lips. 



All around us in England, in Devonshire, in Torquay, 

 and all over the globe, lie the memorials of human 

 beings, of whose day and generation the oldest historical 

 records we possess know absolutely nothing. Here 

 and there the tale is told by a heap of shells. From 

 such heaps we know what dishes were served at the 

 Dane's dinner-table, at a time when cereal crops were 

 unknown in Denmark, and sea-weed was used instead 

 of salt 2 . Oysters and cockles, mussels and periwinkles, 

 seem to have been ad libitum; the stag, the roe-deer, 

 and the wild boar were at the service of that ancient 

 Dane as often as he could catch them with his weapons 

 of wood, stone, horn, or bone 3 ; when pork and 

 venison were scarce, his palate could content itself with 

 dog or fox. From the waters of the mountain -lake, 

 from the centre of the high-piled barrow, in the circles 



1 Sir J. Lubbock, ' Prehistoric Times/ p. 502, second edition. 

 2 Ibid. p. 223. 8 Ibid. p. 233. 



