16 BEPORT — 1897. 



period of time if we have to allow for the migration of the primseval 

 hunters from their original home, wherever it may have been in Asia or 

 Africa, to the west of Europe, including Britain. We have seen that, 

 during this migration, the forms of the weapons and tools made from 

 silicious stones had become, as it were, stereotyped, and further, that, 

 during the subsequent extended period implied by the erosion of the 

 A^Ueys, the modifications in the form of the implements and the changes 

 in the fauna associated with the men who used them were but slight. 



At the close of the period during which the valleys were being eroded 

 comes that represented by the latest occupation of the caves by Paleolithic 

 man, when both in Britain and in the south of France the reindeer was 

 abundant ; but among the stone weapons and implements of that long 

 troglodytic phase of man's history not a single example with the edge 

 sharpened by grinding has as yet been found. All that can safely be said 

 is that the larger implements as well as the larger mammals had become 

 scarcer, that greater power in chipping flint had been attained, that the 

 arts of the engraver and the sculptor had considerably developed, and 

 that the use of the bow had probably been discovered. 



Directly we encounter the relics of the Neolithic Period, often, in the 

 case of the caves lately mentioned, separated from the eailier remains by 

 a thick layer of underlying stalagmite, we find flint hatchets polished at 

 the edge and on the surface, cutting at the broad and not at the narrow 

 end, and other forms of implements associated with a fauna in all essential 

 respects identical with that of the present day. 



Were the makers of these polished weapons the direct descendants of 

 Palpeolithic ancestors whose occupation of the country was continuous 

 from the days of the old river gravels ? or had these long since died out, 

 so that after Western Europe had for ages remained uninhabited, it was 

 re-peopled in Neolithic times by the immigration of some new race of 

 men ? Was there, in fact, a ' great gulf fixed ' between the two occupa- 

 tions ? or w^as there in Europe a gradual transition from the one stage of 

 culture to the other ? 



It has been said that 'what song the Syrens sang, or what name 

 Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, though puzzling 

 questions, are not beyond all conjecture ' ; and though the questions now 

 proposed may come under the same category, and must await the dis- 

 covery of many more essential facts before they receive definite and satis- 

 factory answers, we may, I think, throw some light upon them if we 

 venture to take a few steps upon the seductive if insecure paths of con- 

 jecture. So far as I know we have as yet no trustworthy evidence of any 

 transition from the one age to the other, and the gulf between them 

 remains practically unbridged. We can, indeed, hardly name the part of 

 the world in which to seek for the cradle of Neolithic civilisation, though 

 we know that traces of what appear to have been a stone-using people 

 have been discovered in Egypt, and that what must be among the latest 



