iiyo LIFE : OUTLINES OF GENERAL BIOLOGY 



A great step to understanding these remains of antiquity was 

 made by Sir John Evans, who clearly distinguished what had 

 hitherto been too vaguely called the Stone Age, into two main 

 periods, relatively Old and New, Palaeolithic and Neolithic; the 

 earlier with flaked implements, and the later enriched also by the 

 advance to smooth-wrought and even polished ones. The flaked 

 tools and weapons were then showing distinct progress in workman- 

 ship, from rudeness to mastery of the material; while polished 

 neolithic implements were also associated with yet more wonder- 

 fully well-chipped ones. And since these evidences of advancing 

 skill were at various points shown also broadly to coincide with the 

 time-succession proved by sections of cavern floors, the archaeologist 

 was thus educated into the evolutionary pre-historian. As evolution- 

 ist he could not but realise that earliest man could not be expected 

 to start by working flints into shaped tools, but must have begun, 

 as a great ape may do, by hammering with stones as he found them. 

 Yet he might soon gain sense to choose hard stones ; and so at length 

 might come on flint, and find it best of aU. This of course would 

 break with hard usage; yet it gets an edge thereby, and so begins 

 the development of axe and scraper. Even with less severe use, the 

 flint may again flake, and readily on the opposite side this time, so 

 giving a true axe or knife-edge accordingly, and not infrequently 

 a sharp point as weU. With such material, that does not readily 

 spoil with use, and even when broken may be all the better, since 

 now with new uses, we recognise an incentive to the utilisation of 

 flints. The first inventor would be he who got interested in hammering 

 flints to break them, and in seeing what came of it: so might not 

 such experimentalists and incipient inventors soon become common? 

 What an interesting, even amusing occupation, in which the men, 

 the women, the children would gather; at once a meeting and a 

 school. Who would not curiously pick up and discuss these frag- 

 ments? And what youths and children would not run home with 

 theirs to try what they could do with them, and so begin educating 

 their elders ; as they happily sometimes do to this day. In such ways, 

 then, we can hardly but imagine the beginnings of the technology 

 of the flint age, and its mental skirmishes and popular diffusion 

 together. It was thus not a little encouraging to find what seemed 

 at first the convincing material evidence of such beginnings. For 

 flints that might have been thus broken, in hammering, and thus 

 also with edges with (or even for) further use, have been collected; 

 and called Eoliths, as becomes what is not yet even palaeolithic, 

 but might well be earlier far. In fact for critical minds, they occur 

 in only too great abundance ; whence their reply to all the preceding : 

 Very pretty, no doubt; but are not your eoliths of mere simple 

 natural and accidental fracture, such as undeniably occur in nature ; 

 and which we can even experimentally reproduce by impacts. 



