OUR ANCESTORS. 2 I$ 



the recurrent cold cycles of the great glacial period; 

 and they were probably all swept away by the last of 

 those long chilly spells, when almost the whole of 

 England was covered by vast sheets of glaciers, like 

 Greenland in our own time. Since their days, Britain 

 has been submerged beneath several hundred feet of 

 sea, raised again, joined to the continent, and once more 

 finally separated from it by the English Channel and 

 the Straits of Dover. Meanwhile, bur own original an- 

 cestors the people from whom by long modification we 

 ourselves are at last descended were probably living 

 away in the warmer south, and there developing the 

 higher physical and intellectual powers by which they 

 were ultimately enabled to overrun the whole northern 

 part of the old world. Accordingly, interesting as these 

 older stone-age savages undoubtedly are low-browed, 

 fierce-jawed, crouching creatures, inferior even to the 

 existing Australians or Andaman Islanders they have 

 no proper place in a pedigree of the modern English 

 people. They were the aboriginal inhabitants of 

 Britain ; but their blood is probably quite unrepre- 

 sented among the Englishmen of the present day. 



Long after these black-fellows, however, and long 

 after the glaciers of the ice age had cleared off the 

 face of the country, a second race occupied Britain, 

 some of whose descendants almost undoubtedly exist 

 in our midst at the present day. These were the 

 neolithic, or later stone-age, men, who have 'been 

 identified, with great probability, as a branch of the 

 same isolated Basque or Euskarian race which now 



