302 THE EEV. J, MAGENS MELLO^ M.A.^ P.G.S., ETC., ON 



British folkloi'e, I venture to differ from his conclusions on 

 one point only, viz., in regard to the totality of the break 

 between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic periods. I have 

 recently inspected in Picardy some of the stone tools and their 

 localities, now so numerous there, and have paid some attention 

 to the philosophic discoveries made and described by Prest- 

 wich, and have formed an opinion that the two periods are, quasi 

 ')nan, only one, and that there has been in the history of man's 

 work a continuous progress. There can be no doubt of the 

 prodigiousness of the physical events referred to, nor of their 

 long continuance, but on the other hand, it is equally certain 

 that the tools of the first period were fabricated by man, and that 

 the tools of the second period are pi-ecisely similar to these. This 

 similarity could not have been from instinct (although such tool- 

 making appears to be nearly co-existent with the race), nor could 

 it have arisen from imitation, for man imitates, but never exactly 

 copies, and must therefore have arisen from the resumption, in 

 the given locality, of the art which had elsewhere been carried 

 on in the interval. It is not so diflficult to believe that men 

 retreated to other parts of the country, whilst the ti-emendous 

 changes were going on here, or that some other inhabited spots in 

 the same stage of occupation furnished suitable ground for 

 emigration, as to suppose a totally different race taking up the 

 manufacture, on precisely the same lines, in exactly the same 

 places, and displaying the same fashions as their predecessors, 

 I saw in Picardy, in the museums and collections there, fine 

 specimens of intermediate forms of stone implements, and was 

 thereby induced to minimize the difference as a chronological 

 datum. 



The effect of the break in the fauna and of the topography 

 of a district, amongst a roving population without buildings or 

 baggage does not, as it seems to me, require any anthropological 

 division. It would appear from geological considerations that 

 the era of the first flint implements was about contemporaneous 

 with the rising of the land, so that long warning was given before 

 the rupture of the chalk and the denudation which accompanied 

 submergence. 



