154 VIGNETTES FROM NATURE. 



away from their surface by the grinding ice- 

 mill. It is only in the protected floors of 

 flooded caves or among the subsisting drift 

 of glacial and interglacial rivers that we can 

 now find any traces of man's early handicraft. 

 Everywhere else the ice-sheet has planed 

 everything bodily off the face of the land : 

 that is why we find few or no palaeolithic 

 skeletons. And we must never forget, in 

 estimating the past history or present fauna 

 and flora of England, that this total blank in 

 our geological and archaeological annals cuts 

 in like a complete interruption between the 

 two known ages of human life in this island. 

 Everything that existed in Britain before the 

 last great ice-age was cleaned utterly off the 

 face of the country by the vast system of 

 glaciers which then grew up ; everything that 

 now exists in it has come into the land since 

 the date of that gradual but all-embracing 

 cataclysm. The men, the animals, the plants 

 which lived here before the ice covered the 

 country belonged to extinct types, or to 



