80 CUP-SHAPED AND OTHER LAPIDAEIAN SCULPTUEES. 



and cromleclis, in numerous cyclopean forts, gigantic stone circles, etc., 

 they must have held the country for a considerable length of time, and 

 overspread the whole of it by the diffusion of their population. From 

 their remains, as left in their tombs and elsewhere, we know that they 

 employed weapons and tools of horn, wood, and polished stone ; manu- 

 factured rude hand-made pottery; had ornaments of jet, bone, etc. ; partially 

 reared and used cereals, as indicated by their stone mullers and querns ; 

 and possessed the dog, ox, sheep, and other domestic quadrupeds. I do 

 not stop to discuss the various questions whether these Megalithic Builders 

 did or did not hollow out and use the archaic single-tree canoes found on 

 our shores, rivers, and lakes; — whether they were the people that anciently 

 whaled in the Firth of Forth with harpoons of deer- horn, when its upper 

 waters were either much higher or its shores much lower than at present ; — 

 whether they or another race built the earliest stone-age crannoges or lake- 

 habitations ; — and again whether there was not an antecedent population 

 of simple fishers and hunters, totally unacouainted with the rearing of corn 

 and cattle, and who have bequeathed to archaeology all their sparse and 

 sole historic records in casual relics of their food, dress, and weapons buried 

 in heaps and mounds of kitchen-refuse, which they have incidentally accu- 

 mulated and left upon our own and upon other northern and western coasts 

 of Europe. Whether these formed one, or two, or more races, let me add, 

 that long .anterior to the Megalithic Builders there certainly existed in our 

 island a tribe of inhabitants that dwelt, in part at least, in natural or arti- 

 ficial caves, where.their bones and their contemporaneous relics have been 

 found; who possessed implements and weapons of stone and flint, but 

 rough, and not polished like those of the Megalithic Builders; who seem- 

 ingly possessed no pottery; who — if we may judge from the want of 

 rubbers and querns to grind corn-food — had little or no knowledge of 

 agriculture; and who lived in those far-distant times when the colossal 

 fossil elephant or mammoth, the woolly-haired rhinoceros, the gigantic 

 cave-bear, the great hyaena, etc., wei'e contemporaneous inhabitants with 

 him of the soil of Britain; when the British lion was a %'eritable ideality and 

 not a heraldic myth; and when possibly England was still geologically 

 united to the Continent, and the Thames was only a tributary of the Rhine. 



