26 ADDRESS TO THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1881. 



about this Stone-age people, but it is surprising how 

 much has been made out. Evans truly observes, in his 

 admirable work on ' Ancient Stone Implements,' ' that 

 so far as external appliances are concerned, they are 

 almost as fully represented as would be those of any 

 existing savage nation by the researches of a painstak- 

 ing traveller.' We have their axes, adzes, chisels, 

 borers, scrapers, and various other tools, and we know 

 how they made and how they used them ; we have 

 their personal ornaments and implements of war ; we 

 have their cooking utensils ; we know what they ate 

 and what they wore; lastly, we know their mode of 

 sepulture and funeral customs. They hunted the deer 

 and horse, the bison and urus, the bear and the wolf, 

 but the reindeer had already retreated to the North. 



No bones of the reindeer, no fragment of any of the 

 extinct mammalia have been found in any of the Swiss 

 lake-villages or in any of the thousands of tumuli which 

 have been opened in our own country or in Central and 

 Southern Europe. Yet the contents of caves and of 

 river-gravels afford abundant evidence that there was a 

 time when the mammoth and rhinoceros, the musk-ox 

 and reindeer, the cave lion and hyena, the great bear 

 and the gigantic Irish elk wandered in our woods and 

 valleys, and the hippopotamus floated in our rivers; 

 when England and France were united, and the Thames 

 and the Rhine had a common estuary. This was long 

 supposed to be before the advent of man. At length, 

 however, the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes in the 

 valley of the Somme, supported as they are by the 

 researches of many continental naturalists, and in our 

 own country of MacEnery and Godwin Austen, Prest- 



