280 EAELY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. vm. 



came the sequence of events recorded in the history of 

 this country; and yet these little heaps, lying im- 

 mediately beneath the greensward, had retained their 

 places undisturbed, although the Eomans used the camp 

 at Cissbury for military purposes, and have left numerous 

 traces of their occupation. From the time when they 

 were made down to to-day there had been no appreciable 

 change in the surface soil in which they rested. With 

 this evidence before us, we cannot shut our eyes to the 

 enormous lapse of time necessary for the production of 

 the great geographical changes which took place in the 

 interval between the Neolithic and Palaeolithic ages. 



Only some three or four, out of the thousands of im- 

 plements found at Cissbury, bear traces of polishing, and 

 these are broken ; from w r hich we may infer that they 

 passed through the first stage of their manufacture at 

 Cissbury, and were subsequently ground as they were 

 wanted by the people who used them elsewhere. This 

 was probably done at home on one of those grindstones 

 generally found in Neolithic villages, like that, for ex- 

 ample, discovered in the log house in Donegal. 



Commerce. 



It is obvious, from the existence of centres of mining 

 and of manufacture, that the Neolithic tribes of Britain 

 had commercial intercourse with each other. The im- 

 plements were distributed over districts very far away 

 from the places where they were made, probably by 

 being passed from hand to hand, and tribe to tribe, in 

 the same manner as copper kettles and other articles^ 

 coming from the Eussians of Kamtchatka, find their way 

 eastward among the Eskimos of West Georgia, and <as 



