Sir H. H. Howot'th — Antiquity of Man. 17 



than direct. The importance of the discovery in each case was 

 only appreciated and its real lesson learnt at a much later time. 



Eckhard, Professor of History at Brunswick, who died in 1730, 

 in his work "De Ox'igine Germanorum," which was not published 

 until twenty years after his death, says, " Lapides armis apud 

 omnes successere aerea" (i.e. "bronze everywhere succeeded stones 

 for arms," op. cit., xlii, p. 81) ; Borlase, in his " Antiquities of 

 Cornwall," 1753, argued in favour of the three ages of man ; while 

 Goguet, in 1758, in his " L'Origine des lois, des arts, et des 

 sciences" (vol. i, book ii, ch. 4, p. 133), says, "All antiquity is 

 agreed that there was a time when the use of metals was unknown 

 in the world." These statements, however, were only echoes of 

 Lucretius. 



The first person who argued scientifically that men at one time 

 used stone for their weapons and tools to the exclusion of metal, 

 that is, argued in favour of a Stone Age, was, according to 

 M. Le Hon, Mahud El, who, having examined a considerable 

 number of so-called thunder-stones, i.e. stone axes, urged in 1734 

 that they were the first instruments made by man at a period when 

 he did not know metal ("L'Homme Fossile," p. 23). Frere, who 

 wrote a good deal later, i.e. in 1797, based his conclusion on certain 

 implements which he had found in the Suffolk gravels. To show 

 how well he had grasped the general conditions of this particular 

 point, I will quote an additional paragraph to that referred to in 

 the previous memoir and cited from his paper in the thirteenth 

 volume of ArcTiceologia, p. 103. He says : " The implements lay 

 in great numbers at the depth of about 12 feet in a stratified soil, 

 which was dug for the purpose of raising clay for bricks " ; and 

 he concludes : " The situation in which these weapons are found 

 may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed, even 

 beyond that of the present world ; but whatever our conjectures on 

 that head may be it will be difficult to account for the stratum 

 in which they lie being covered by another stratum .... The 

 manner in which they lie would lead to the persuasion that it was 

 a place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit, and 

 the number of them was so great that the man who carried on the 

 brickwork told me that before he was aware of their being objects 

 of curiosity he had emptied baskets full of them into the ruts of 

 the adjoining road. He concludes that the different strata were 

 laid down by different inundations." So much for Frere. 



It was the explorers of caves, however, who first produced 

 evidence that man had existed in Europe when hygenas and lions 

 were still living there; thus, in 1774 Esper, in publishing his 

 account of the cave at Gailenreuth, tells us he had found a jaw 

 and a shoulder-blade of a man mixed with the remains of these 

 animals, and he declared it to be his opinion that these bones were 

 all contemporary. There is no reason to question either Esper's 

 competence as a witness or the fact of the discovery. In 1804 

 Eosenmuller published an account of his own researches in the 

 same district, and says that he was convinced by the testimony of 



BECADE IV. VOL. IX. — NO. I. 2 



