THE ENGLISH PEOPLE. 1G9 



the seal and the reindeer among the ice-encum- 

 bered caves of preglacial Yorkshire. But, if so, 

 the enormous lapse of time which has intervened 

 to separate lis from these our earliest recognizable 

 British ancestors has produced so immense a mod- 

 ification in t\'pe and feature as to render us practi- 

 cally a different race from our remote progenitors. 

 For the men of the older stone age, as arclueologlsts 

 call the very early barbarous inhabitants of still 

 Continental Britain, were a horde of exceedingly 

 low and primitive savages, with smaller brains 

 than any existing group of the human family, and 

 with traits which mark them out as inferior even 

 to the naked Australian black fellows of our 

 own time. All the evidence we yet possess goes 

 to show that these primitive people were driven 

 southward into Mediterranean Europe by the 

 gradual approach of very cold conditions in the 

 area of Britain ; and therefore we have compara- 

 tively little reason to suppose that their blood has 

 left any distinct traces on the modern population 

 of the British Isles. 



It is different, however, with the second great 

 group of people who are known to liave settled 

 on the soil of England. The men of the newer 

 stone age, who colonized our island immediately 

 after the return of warmer and more genial condi- 

 tions in Northern Europe, have evidently con- 

 tributed no small proportion of their blood to the 



