64 Flowers and their Pedigrees. 



There is every reason to believe that, at the close of 

 the last glacial epoch, Great Britain anci Ireland 

 formed a part of the Continent, not in the sense in 

 which Scandinavia or Denmark still does, but in the 

 sense in which Bavaria and Switzerland still do. The 

 land of Europe then stretched out to seaward far 

 beyond Ireland, Spain, and the Faroe Islands ; and 

 Cork, Glasgow, and Liverpool then stood further 

 inland than Lyons, Munich, and Geneva stand at the 

 present day. 



Walking one morning a few winters since — just 

 after the most terrible tempest of recent years — on the 

 Parade at Hastings, I happened to notice a curiously 

 shaped flint among the shingle lately thrown up by 

 the great storm. The waves had beaten right over the 

 sea-wall, and scattered a litter of wrack and pebbles 

 along the w'hole roadway. I stooped down and 

 picked up the odd-looking fragment : to my surprise, 

 I found it was a palaeolithic implement, a rudely 

 chipped flint knife of the older stone age, the relic of 

 a race compared with whom even the builders of 

 Wansdyke here were men of yesterday. This rude 

 flake was fashioned by the naked black- fellows who 

 hunted the rhinoceros and the mammoth in the 

 English valleys, before ever the great ice age itself 

 had spread its glaciers over the length and breadth of 



