64 Flowers and their Pedigrees, 



There is every reason to believe that, at the close of 

 the last glacial epoch, Great Britain and Ireland 

 formed a part of the Continent, not in the sense in 

 which Scandinavia or Denmark still does, but in the 

 sense in w hich Bavaria and Switzerland still do. The 

 land of Europe then stretched out to seaward far 

 beyond Ireland, Spain, and the Faroe Islands ; and 

 Cork, GlasjTow, and Liverpool then stood further 

 inland than Lyons, Munich, and Geneva stand at the 

 present da\'. 



Walking one morning a few winters since— just 

 after the most terrible tempest of recent years— on the 

 Parade at Hastings, I happened to notice a curiously 

 shaped flint among the shingle lately thrown up by 

 the Gfrcat storm. The waves had beaten riirht over the 

 sea-wall, and scattered a litter of wrack and pebbles 

 along the whole roadway. I stooped down and 

 picked up the odd-looking fragment : to my surprise, 

 I found it was a palaeolithic implement, a rudely 

 chipped flint knife of the older stone age, the relic of 

 a race compared with whom even the builders of 

 Wansdyke here were men of yesterday. This rude 

 flake was fashioned by the naked black- fellows who 

 hunted the rhinoceros and the mammoth in the 

 English valleys, before ever the great ice age itself 

 had spread its glaciers over the length and breadth of 



