376 SCIENCE FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



are more ancient) the Stone Age was coming to its end, 

 and the Bronze Age coming in. 



Everywhere, but not always within the same thousand 

 years or so, we see as we go still farther back, the use of 

 metal giving place to the use of stone. In Europe we 

 see a highly-developed material civilisation from three to 

 seven thousand years ago. The people till the land, sow 

 crops, keep herds, build houses (of wood), make pottery 

 combs for the hair, necklaces of amber and of shells, 

 and other ornaments, but they have no metal weapons or 

 implements. They sometimes use native gold to make 

 decorative ornaments ; but their knives, daggers, swords, 

 saws, and hammers are all of stone, either flint or dense 

 greenstone. We reach this purely Stone Age in Europe 

 at 2000 B.C. ; in Egypt we do not get back to it so 

 soon, but, about 5000 B.C., we there come upon a pre- 

 Pharaonic population which made use of beautifully- 

 finished stone knives in place of metal. The first people 

 we come upon in Europe as we pass from the Bronze to 

 the Stone Age had a great deal of skill and an elaborate 

 social organisation. Their stone weapons were beautifully 

 chipped and often highly polished (Figs. 66 and 67). We 

 find the slabs of grit upon which they rubbed the chipped 

 flint adzes in order to make them smooth. But soon 

 we find, as we go back, that polishing is unknown, and 

 that the chipped flint adzes are used in a rough state. 

 On entering the Stone Age we find that we are 

 only on the fringe of an immense period of " stone- 

 weaponed humanity," extending back for tens of 

 thousands of generations of men, when stone (and in 

 Europe especially, that stone which we call " flint ") was 

 the one great stand-by of the human race the one 

 hard cutting material which man learnt to shape and 

 apply to his own purposes so as to make holes with it, 

 saw with it, scrape with it, cut with it, kill with it. On 



