CURIOUS CREATURES. 39 



fully finished stone arms and implements, which neces- 

 sarily show a later time, and a higher state of civilisa- 

 tion which is called the Neolithic period. The next 

 age is that of bronze, when man had learned to smelt 

 metals, and make moulds, showing a great advance 

 and, finally, the Iron Age, in which man had subdued 

 the sterner metal to his will and this age immediately 

 precedes History. 



The cave men were of undoubted antiquity and 

 were hunters of the wild beasts that then overran 

 Western Europe, and who split the bones of those 

 animals which they slew in order to obtain the marrow. 

 Although strictly belonging to the Palaeolithic period, 

 they manufactured out of that stubborn material, flint, 

 spear-heads, knives, scrapers and, when the bow had 

 been invented, arrow-heads. Nor were they deficient in 

 the rudiments of art, as some tracings and carvings on 

 pieces of the horns of slaughtered animals, clearly show. 

 Mr. Christie in digging in the Dordogne caves found, at 

 La Madelaine, engraved and carved pictures of reindeer, 

 an ibex, a mammoth, &c., all of them recognisable, and 

 the mammoth, a very good likeness. This was incised 

 on a piece of mammoth tusk. 



The lake men, judging by the remains found near 

 their dwellings, occupied their houses during the Stone 

 and Bronze periods. Herodotus mentions these curious 

 dwellings. "But those around Mount Pangaeus and 

 near the Doberes, the Agrianae, Odomanti, and those 

 who inhabit Lake Prasias * itself, were not at all sub- 

 dued by Megabazus. Yet he attempted to conquer those 

 who live upon the lake, in dwellings contrived after this 

 manner : planks, fitted on lofty piles, are placed in the 



1 A lake between Macedonia and Thrace. 



