THE LAPSE OF TIME. Ill 



three centuries from the Flood to the age of Julius 

 Caesar. If this chronology is to be accepted, Kent's 

 cavern must have been filled either in the first period or 

 in the second. As the same arguments will apply to 

 each, let us assume that the second or longer period 

 sufficed for this purpose, and see what further admis- 

 sions this assumption will involve. We have three and 

 twenty centuries at our disposal. At the end of that 

 time we know historically that Britain was occupied by 

 tribes more or less savage, some of them going about 

 almost naked, destitute of almost all the arts of civili- 

 zation. We are to imagine the ancestors of this wild 

 race migrating from Asia and slowly pioneering their 

 way to the western limits of Europe. Necessity is the 

 mother of invention; but these men in their difficult 

 adventurous travel through unknown seas and path- 

 less jungles tenanted by dangerous beasts, learn only 

 how to forget. They forget the use of brass and iron, 

 and take to weapons and tools of flint ; they give up 

 tillage ; they give up building strong towers, and 

 shelter themselves in wooden huts or caves and dens of 

 the earth. The climate of Western Asia is warm and 

 sunny, that of England often, and in many parts, bleak 

 and foggy and cold ; therefore these intelligent children 

 of Noah, in order perhaps to harden themselves in the 

 process of acclimatization, as they force their way into 

 the fog and mist, instead of keeping or assuming the 

 flowing robes of the Asiatic, exchange their garments, 

 at any rate in battle, for a wash of paint. How inter- 

 esting it would be to have the family portraits of a 



