TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 



1003 



phase of prehistoric archseolo-jy, he contrasted the few primitive arts, such as 

 sewing, and the manufacture of personal ornaments and rude implements of the 

 chase, possessed by the palfeolithic hunters — apart from their great proficiency in 

 the deUneation of animals — with the variety of arts, such as husbandry, gardening, 

 spinning, weaving, carpentry, boat-building, mining, and pottery-maljing, possessed 

 by the neolithic herdsmen, and held that between the two there is a great gulf 

 fixed. Somewhere that gulf must be bridged over. Professor Boyd Dawkins says 

 that the bridge is not to be found in the caverns of the South of France. It is 

 difficult to meet his argument that the presence of grains of barley and stones of 

 the cultivated plum at Mas d'Azil are evidences of neolithic civilisation. His 

 objections to other discoveries are not so strong as this, but are strong enough to 

 make us pause. The tall, long-headed people, whose remains Avere found at Cro- 



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Magnon, he holds to be early neolithic and not palaeolithic, to stand on the near 

 side and not on the far side of the great gulf. 



These considerations lend importance to the discoveries which have been laid 

 before this Association at previous meetings by Mr. Seton-Kerr, and which have 

 also been commented upon by Professor FUnders Petri e and Sir John Evans. If 

 we are compelled to admit a breach of continuity in Europe, is it in Africa that 

 we shall find the missing links? That is another of the great problems yet un- 

 solved. The evidence we want relates to events which took place at so great a dis- 

 tance of time that we may well wait patiently for it, assured that somewhere or 

 other these missing links in the chain of continuity must have existed and probably 

 are still to be found. 



The next stage, which comprises the interval between the neolithic and the 

 historic periods, was so ably dealt with by Mr. Arthur J. Evans in his address to 

 this Section at the Liverpool meeting that it does not call for any observations 



