^iS NINETEENTH CENTURY. pt. tii. 



these were much older, because bronze was used long before 

 iron was discovered. And lastly in some, tools of stone 

 only have been found, some beautifully polished, but others 

 rough and rude, showing that the men who used them must 

 have been mere savages like the Australians now ; and yet 

 the oldest of these lake- villages have no bones of extinct 

 animals in them, and therefore cannot be so ancient as those 

 men whose tools were found in the cavern at Torquay and 

 the sandpits of Abbeville, or as have since been found in 

 England, Denmark, Germany, America, and indeed in 

 almost all countries. 



It is impossible, without a knowledge of geology, to realise 

 how very long ago these last-mentioned men must have lived. 

 But when I tell you that since their tools were buried in the 

 rocks, there has been time for beds of immense thickness to 

 be laid down little by little, as the Ganges is laying them 

 down now ; for parts of the French valleys to be gradually 

 w^ashed away, and their shape altered ; for rivers to change 

 their courses, and vast beds of peat to grow over the 

 bottoms of the valleys ; and, more than all, for whole races 

 of animals which once lived to have died quite away from 

 the face of the earth, you may perhaps form some idea of the 

 long ages that man must have been upon our globe. This 

 history, however, is so new and as yet so little understood, 

 that it cannot be explained in a few pages. You will find 

 all the proofs of it given in Sir Charles Lyell's work on the 

 * Antiquity of Man,' in which they were first collected in 1863 ; 

 and you must remember the fact, that man is very ancient, 

 as one of the great discoveries of the nineteenth century. 



Chief Works consulted. — Lyell's * Principles of Geology,* 'Elements 

 of Geology,' * Antiquity of Man ; ' Lubbock's * Prehistoric Times ; * 

 'Quarterly Geological Journal,' vol. xxx. : Obituary of Agassiz. 



