ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 217 



Savages no doubt were in the habit of picking up and 

 using such flakes, and even of carrying them to dis- 

 tricts where they were less abundant, and of chipping 

 them for themselves when natural ones could not be 

 found ; but no one can distinguish those which man 

 has used from the vastly greater number which nature 

 has produced and man has not touched, except when 

 they are found in association with unquestionable 

 human remains. Taking these considerations into 

 account, it appears to me that the Palaeolithic period, 

 as a distinct age, fades away from view, and is rather 

 a local phenomenon than one relating to time. It is, 

 perhaps, rather a product of the imagination of over- 

 zealous antiquaries, whose fancies have too readily 

 been accepted as facts by geologists. There is, in- 

 deed, no good evidence that the people of the earliest 

 Stone age in Europe were materially different in grade 

 of civilization from the aborigines of America at the 

 period of its discovery, a conclusion confirmed by the 

 fact that their skeletons were so remarkably similar in 

 type, and that their brains were in no respect inferior. 

 If, therefore, we are to make any twofold division of 

 the people of the Stone age, it should be on some 

 other ground than the quality of their implements. 

 They may be divided into the men of the Mammoth 

 age and of the Reindeer age, after the French and 

 Belgian archaeologists; or, as this is merely a local 

 distinction, the reindeer not being found in Italy, for 

 instance, we might regard them as men living before 

 and after the last subsidence of the land, or as Ante- 



