i'EB. 24, 1882.] 



♦ KNOWLEDGE • 



351 



^MACi^ZlNE Of SCIENCE 



^lAlNIlTI^ORDED-EXACrrfPESCRIBED 



LONDON: FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1882. 



Contents op No. 17. 



Our Ancestors. — I. The Stone Age 



M,!i Bt Grant Allen 331 



: the Moon bv Ti<l«l Evolu- 

 Parl II. Bv Dr. Ball, 

 I'^mer Rojnl for Ireland ... 352 

 . about Luck. Bjr 



353 



' ^tal Palace Electrical Exhi- 

 Third Notice. (lUia. 



.1 354 



uband 336 



It Pyramid. By the Editor 356 



r.^ubies. Punninu 357 



Celestial Objects for 

 uon Telescopes 353 



PiOB 



Easy Lessons io Blowpipe Che- 

 mistrv. — Lesson III. By Lieut. - 



Col. W. A. Koss, late B.A 359 



The Brain and Skull (lUuatrattd) ... 359 



IntelliKence in Animals 361 



CoBRBspoNUBxcK ; — Erratum — 

 Flexure in Planets— Interior Heat 

 of the Earth— Hog Puizle, ic. 361-363 



Queries 364 



Replies to Queries 364 



Answers to Correspondents 365 



Notes on .\rt and Science 367 



Our Mathematical Coltunn 36S 



Our Chess Column 369 



Our WTiist Column 370 



OUR ANCESTORS. 



] — THE STONE ACxE MEN. 

 By Grant Allen. 



THERE are few questions more immediately interesting 

 to Englishmen thaix the question — who are our an- 

 estors ] From wliat elements and in what proportions 

 ire we compounded 1 May we consider ourselves as all 

 5ure Teutons ? or are we partly Celts as well 1. Further- 

 nore, may we even reckon among our immediate ancestry 

 iome still earlier and less historical races than either of 

 Jiese ] Such questions are fvill of practical importance to 

 Durselve^, and they are also of a sort upon which modern 

 nvestigations into language and the science of man ha^■e 

 «st a strikingly new and unexpected light 



Of course, in considering the origin of Englishmen, we 



juust look at the matter in no petty provincial spirit. We 



inust include roughly in that general name Welshmen, 



•scotclmien, and Irishmen as well ; and if our friends in the 



liorth prefer to speak of Britain rather than of England, I 



|im sure I, for my part, will have no objection. There are 



nany learned modern historians, with Mr. Freeman at 



heir head, who wUl tell us that Englishmen are almost 



3ure-blooded Teutons, of the same original stock as the 



ermans, the Dutch, and the Danes and Norwegians. But 



s'hen we come to inquire more fully into their meaning, it 



urns out that they are speaking only of the native inhabi- 



ants of England proper and the Scotch Lowlands, without 



aking into consideration at all the people of Wales, 



reland, and the Highlands, or the numerous descen- 



iants of immigrants from those districts into the south- 



•astern half of Great Britain. Even in the restricted 



"".ngland itself, these same doughty Teutonic advocates admit 



hat there is a nearly pure Celtic (or pre-Celtic) population 



it Cornwall, in Cumberland, and in Westmoreland ; while 



he western half of the Lowlands, from Glasgow to the 



>order, is also allowed to be inhabited by a mainly Welsh 



ace. Furthermore, it is pretty generally granted by our 



toutest Teutonic champions themselves, that the people 



of Dorset, Somerset, and Devon ; of Lancashire, Cheshire, 

 Shropshire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire ; are all 

 largely mingled with Celtic blood. Thus, in the end, it 

 appears that only the native inliabitants of the Lothians 

 and the Eastern and Southern coast of England are 

 claimed as pure Teutons, oven by those who most loudly 

 assert the essentially Teutonic origin of the English people. 

 We may possiljly tind that this little Teutonic belt, or 

 border itself, is not without a fair sprinkling of earlier 

 blood. 



Perhaps the best way to clear up this question will be to 

 glance briefly at the various races which have inliabited 

 these islands, one after another, and then to inquire how 

 far their descendants still exist in our midst, how large a 

 proportion of our blood they have contributed, and where- 

 abouts their representatives are now mainly to be found. 

 Of course, in such an inquiry we can only arrive at \ ery 

 approximate results, for in our present advanced stage of 

 intermixture, it is almost impossible for any man to say 

 exactly what are the proportions of various races, even in 

 his own person. Each of us is descended from two parents, 

 four grand-parents, eight grand-grand-parents, and so forth ; 

 so that, unless we could hunt up our pedigrees in every 

 direction for ten generations, involving a knowledge of no 

 less than 1,02-1 ditlercnt persons at the tenth stage back- 

 ward, we could not even say how far we ourselves were 

 descended from Irish, Scotch, Welsh, or English ancestors 

 respectively. As a matter of fact, everyone of us is now, 

 probably, a very mixed product indeed of Teutonic, Celtic, 

 and still earlier elements, which we cannot practically 

 unravel : and, perhaps, all we can really do is to point out 

 that here one kind of blood is predominant, there another, 

 and yonder again a third. 



The very eai4iest race of men who ever lived in England 

 are probably not in any sense our ancestors. They were 

 those black fellows of the palaeolithic or older stone age, 

 whose flint implements and other remains we tind buried 

 in the loose earth of the river-drift or under the concreted 

 floors of caves, and who dwelt in Britain while it was yet 

 a part of the mainland, with a cold climate like that of 

 modern Siberia. These people seem to have lived before 

 and between the recurrent cold cycles of the great glacial 

 period ; and they were probably all swept away by the last 

 of those long chilly spells, when almost the whole of 

 England was covered by a vast sheet of glaciers, like 

 Greenland in our own time. Since their days, Britain has 

 been submerged beneath several hundred feet of sea, raised 

 again, joined to the continent, and once more finally 

 separated from it by the English Channel and the Straits 

 of Dover. Meanwhile, our own original ancestors — the 

 people from whom Ijy long moditication we ourselves are at 

 last descended — were probably living away in the warmer 

 south, and there developing the 'higher physical and intel- 

 lectual powers by which thej' were ultimately enabled to 

 overrun the whole northern part of the old world. 

 Accordingly, interesting as these older stone age savages 

 undoubtedly are — low-browed, fierce-jawed, crouching 

 creatures, inferior even to the existing Australians or 

 Andaman Islanders — they have yet no proper place in a 

 pedigree of the modern English people. They were the 

 aboriginal inhabitants of Britain ; but their blood is 

 probably quite unrepresented among the Englishmen of 

 the present day. 



Long after these black fellows, however, and long after 

 the glaciers of the ice age had cleared ofl" the face of the 

 country, a second race occupied Britain, some of whose 

 descendants almost undoubtedly exist in our midst at the 

 present day. These were the neolithic, or later stone-age 

 men, who have been identified, with great probability, as a 



