304 



NA TURE 



{Feb. 1 8, 1875 



state of civilisation and habits of life, inferred from their 

 remains, point to the dwellers along the Arctic shores, 

 and especially to the Eskimo, as their nearest representa- 

 tives. Who the Eskimo are is not known, but a broad- 

 skulled race seems to be following them from the east as 

 the broad-skulled race of later neolithic times did the 

 long-skulled people of the earlier neolithic age, who were 

 separated from them by differences of racial character 

 quite as strong as any we have in the present state of the 

 evidence any right to assume existed between the neo- 

 lithic dolicocephali and the pateolithic people. 



Prof. Dawkins finds osteological affinities between the 

 Basques and the earlier neolithic Troglodytes, and Mr. 

 John Rhys follows this up by pointing out peculiarities o' 

 construction in the Welsh language which he thinks may 



be explained by the idioms having been derived from an 

 Iberian tongue. It seems agreed that we have in the 

 neohthic people a mixture of an Aryan and Turanian 

 race. May it not be that the Basques are the direct 

 descendants of a pakieolithic tribe who were not quite 

 absorbed, but who have gone through a neolithic phase 

 of culture, and that the Eskimos may, when we know 

 them, turn out to be another paleolithic tribe banished 

 by the Aryan invaders to the far north, and living still in 

 the same rude way that they did in palsolithic times ? 



However, this is at present mere speculation ; the data 

 before us do not furnish sufficient evidence to enable us 

 to come to any satisfactory conclusion on this point. 



There have been no great geographical changes since 

 neolithic times. The hand of man has done perhaps 



View of King's Scar, Settle, shi 



: the entrances of the Victori.i and Albert Caves (from a photograph). A, B, Victoria: c, Alb3rt. 



more than nature towards modifying the climate of 

 Western Europe since that period. The surface of 

 the country was then " covered with rock, forest, and 

 morass, which afforded shelter to the elk, bison, and 

 urus" (p. 262). When man had felled the woods and 

 drained the land, the country must have become per- 

 ceptibly dryer and warmer. 



But, in tracing back the history of man, we meet with 

 a great difficulty at the close of the early stone or pateo- 

 lithic period. There is generally a gap. We ask, Why 

 did not the use of polished weapons come in gradually, 

 so that we might find a few pohshed weapons at first, 

 then more as we search the deposits of more recent date ; 

 just as bronze and iron were gradually introduced among 

 the stone-using people, but did not at once supersede the use 

 of that material ? Why, in the deposits along rivers and in 



caves, is there so often evidence of a great lapse of time 

 between their occupation by the paleolithic and neolithic 

 folk ? Why is the group of associated animals so dif- 

 erent ? Why is it that, where deposits belonging to these 

 two periods have been found together, there is generally 

 evidence to show that they were separated in age by an 

 enormous interval, during which considerable geographi- 

 cal changes have been brought about by the gradual 

 operations of nature? This has induced many to seek for 

 some cause of a general kind to explain the sweeping 

 away of the old order of things, and the incoming of a 

 new and different group. Of course geologists seek first 

 an explanation in the glacial period. But wherever the 

 deposits containing the remains of paleolithic man have 

 been found in connection with boulder-clay, and their 

 relation can be made out, the implement-bearing beds are 



