July II, 1872] 



NATURE 



207 



tion thus obtained has been methodised and arranged. 

 The book completely exhausts the subject, and will long 

 continue to serve as a perfect manual for the collector, as 

 well as furnishing most useful materials for archaeologists 

 and anthropologists. 



Those who are not already somewhat versed in this 

 science will be astonished to learn the infinite variety of 

 uses to which the apparently stubborn and unmanageable 

 rock called flint has been converted. We may, perhaps, 

 doubt if in the very earliest ages it was used for purposes 

 of warfare, and we prefer to give our progenitors the 

 benefit of that doubt, and to believe that those were 

 "golden ages " — times of primitive piety and peace ; and 

 that it was only for purposes of husbandry, and the chase, 

 and domestic use that they worked up the materials 

 found in their plains and valleys. Thus, we find descrip- 

 tions of celts, or axes for felling trees, or hewing canoes, 

 hoes, threshing machines — as now used in the E\st — or 



Fig. 3.— Akrow-head, Isle of Skve 



perhaps harrows, scrapers for preparing skins, arrows for 

 birds or other " small deer," knives, gouges, saws, muUcrs 

 or pounding stones, chisels, hammer axes or picks, and 

 pohshing or grinding stones, of which there must have 

 been great need ; nor were the women of the period left 

 destitute of their share of the stony spoil ; for we find in 

 these pages descriptions and figures of rings, armlets, 

 amulets, spindle whorls, pestles, and, in the cave deposits, 

 needles of bone of admirable workmanship, which might 

 have been, and probably were, drilled by flint flakes. 



As these primitive people have left us no record of their 

 progress in arts and manufactures, and the material evi- 

 dences bearing on the subject are found in a very con- 

 fused and dislocated condition, it is a work of no small 

 labour to classify and arrange them in order of date, or 

 rather of sequence, and thus none but a rough and wide 

 schemeofclassification is possible. The Danish and French 



authors, as well as many of our own, usually divide the 

 stone implement period into two principal stages only, the 

 Palaeolithic and Neolithic — unpolished and polished ; 

 placing them both before what has been called the Bronze 

 age. This arrangement, however, although found con- 

 venient for popular use, and in that sense adopted by Mr. 

 Evans, can hardly be regarded as scientifically accurate ; 

 as he has himself observed, there are blanks in the 

 chronology of stone implements, which it is hard to fill 

 up. The classification may be, and indeed is, too wide in 

 one respect, and too limited in another. Whilst, on the 



A 



Fic."4.— Ukouhart 



one hand, the drift and the cave implement periods, which 

 are usually bracketed together as Palreolithic, are charac- 

 terised by very various conditions, both palxontological 

 and geological, and, indeed, technological also — con- 

 ditions which may indicate their separation by a vast in- 

 terval of time ; so, on the other hand, as ]Mr. Evans has 

 shown at the close of the fourth chapter, some of the un- 

 polished stones, chipped or rough hewn celts, were probably 

 of a date not earlier than some that were ground and 

 polished ; and, in Great Britain, at least, there are not 

 wanting indications that the use of bronze was coeval with 

 the polished stone period, if not, indeed, with one or two 

 exceptions (which were probably imports) anterior to it. 

 One of the most perplexing questions sug:;ested by 

 the discovery of the drift implements relates to the means 

 by which they came into their present position. They are 

 often mat with at a depth of twenty or even thirty feet, 



Fig. 5 —Aberdeenshire 



usually at or near the base of thick beds of coarse flint 

 gravel, which in its turn is overlain by masses, more or less 

 thick, of brick-earth or loess. Occasionally, and indeed 

 not rarely, they occur entirely beneath the gravels, and 

 on the surface of the subjacent rock, whatever it may 

 chance to be. Mr. Evans deals with them merely as con- 

 stituent portions of the beds of sand, gravel, and clay, 

 in which they occur, and so indeed they no.v are, bat they 

 are something more. Although of the drift, drifty, each 

 has its own separate history ; for each has been held and 

 fashioned by hands guided by an intelligent will, and thus 



