GEOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY OF CORNWALL AND DEVON. 267 



relative abundance on both the modern and the ancient beaches of 

 Cornwall will do good service ; and he who will carefully dredge 

 the English Channel, to ascertain whether or not there are in it 

 any submarine outliers of gravel containing chalk flints, will, I 

 had almost said, do a better. 



The Megalithk Monuments of Cormoall: — Eecent discoveries 

 have so closely coimected Geology with Archaeology as to render 

 it difficult to say where the one ends or the other begins. Nothing 

 can be more certain than that, instead of having an unexplored ter- 

 ritory between them, they overlap. Man was certainly, in Britain, 

 the contemporary of many animals which had become extinct 

 before the times of history and even of tradition ; he occupied this 

 land at a time when many of our valleys were much less deep 

 than they are at present ; when the ancient forests so frequently 

 laid bare on our tidal strands were in vigorous growth, and 

 sheltered the mammoth and his contemporaries; he probably 

 collected shell-fish on what are now our Raised beaches ; at his 

 advent here he was ignorant not only of the use of any kind of 

 metals, as such, but also of the art of polishing his stone imple- 

 ments in order to increase their efficiency ; his most powerful tools 

 were flints chipped into shape but left unpolished, but in addition 

 to these he converted bones into ''harpoons" or fish-spears, awls, 

 pins, and eyed-needles. 



The foregoing facts must be my apology for suggesting a line 

 of inquiry respecting the Megklithic Monuments of Cornwall. 

 That they are very old must be admitted ; but there is reason to 

 believe that but few, if any, of them go into a more remote an- 

 tiquity than that which archaeologists term the Age of Bronze, in 

 Britain. Possibly a few of them may be Neolithic ; — that is, they 

 may go back to the age when polished stone implements were 

 the most powerful man had yet invented — but it may be regarded 

 as certain that all of them fall very far short of that still earlier 

 Palceolithic time when our predecessors, as has been already stated, 

 used flint tools formed by chipping merely. 



The great stone structures, as we all know, are frequently 

 ascribed to the Druids, just as we sometimes assign supposed 

 anomalies in Meteorology to irregularities of the Gulf Stream ; in 

 Physics, to Electricity ; in Astronomy, to the tail of a comet ; 



G 3 



