ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 107 



narrow end, and other forms of implements associated with a fauna 

 in all essential respects identical with that of the present day. 



Were the makers of these polished weapons the direct descend- 

 ants of palaeolithic ancestors whose occupation of the country was 

 continuous from the days of the old river gravels? or had these 

 long since died out, so that after western Europe had for ages re- 

 mained uninhabited it was repeopled in neolithic times by the immi- 

 gration of some new race of men? "Was there, in fact, a "great 

 gulf fixed " between the two occupations? or was there in Europe 

 a gradual transition from the one stage of culture to the other? It 

 has been said that " what song the sirens sang, or what name Achilles 

 assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling ques- 

 tions, are not beyond all conjecture " ; and though the questions 

 now proposed may come under the same category, and must await 

 the discovery of many more essential facts before they receive defi- 

 nite and satisfactory answers, we may, I think, throw some light 

 upon them if we venture to take a few steps upon the seductive if 

 insecure paths of conjecture. So far as I know we have as yet no 

 trustworthy evidence of any transition from the one age to the 

 other, and the gulf between them remains practically unbridged. 

 We can, indeed, hardly name the part of the world in which to seek 

 for the cradle of neolithic civilization, though we know that traces 

 of what appear to have been a stone-using people have been discov- 

 ered in Egypt, and that what must be among the latest of the relics 

 of their industry have been assigned to a date some thirty-five hun- 

 dred to four thousand years before our era. The men of that time 

 had attained to the highest degree of skill in working flint that has 

 ever been reached. Their beautifully made knives and spearheads 

 seem indicative of a culminating point reached after long ages of 

 experience; but whence these artists in flint came or who they were 

 is at present absolutely unknown, and their handiworks afford no 

 clew to help us in tracing their origin. Taking a wider survey, we 

 may say that, generally speaking, not only the fauna but the surface 

 configuration of the country were, in western Europe at all events, 

 much the same at the commencement of the neolithic period as they 

 are at the present day. We have, too, no geological indications to 

 aid us in forming any chronological scale. 



The occupation of some of the caves in the south of France 

 seems to have been carried on after the erosion of the neighboring 

 river valleys had ceased, and so far as our knowledge goes these 

 caves offer evidence of being the latest in time of those occupied by 

 man during the palaeolithic period. It seems barely possible that 

 though in the north of Europe there are no distinct signs of such 

 late occupation, yet that in the south man may have lived on, though 



