NATURE OF ROOTS AND WORDS. 513 



and archseologists, have been assumed to relegate the earliest traces 

 of the existence of our race to a period so immensely remote, as to 

 startle and confound the boldest imagination ; an antiquity of hun- 

 dreds, nay, thousands of centuries being demanded for man. These 

 discoveries have at least proved beyond a doubt that man was an 

 inhabitant of Europe, not only when the mammoth, the woolly 

 rhinoceros, the reindeer and other arctic fauna inhabited the south 

 of France, but also when the lion, the hysena, the hippopotamus and 

 other animals now peculiar to tropical countries, ranged as far nortli 

 as Great Britain. 



This question of the antiquity of man is, however, of no direct 

 interest to the giottologist, except in so far as it gives a greater lapse 

 of time for the great changes which language must have undergone 

 since its birth. He is more concerned in inquiring whether there be 

 any evidence as to the intellectual capacity of the first of our race, to 

 whose existence these records bear witness. 



What manner of men were they, then, of whom we have the earliest 

 traces ; the contemporaries of the mammoth and other extinct animals 1 

 The river-drift gravel-beds of the Somme, the subterranean cave- 

 dwellings of Germany, France and Great Britain, the older among 

 the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the shell-mounds of Denmark, all 

 give the same answer : the first men were tool-makers and tool-users. 

 Their tools were, to be sure, of the rudest description ; but they have 

 outlasted the remains of the men themselves. The direct evidence 

 as to the personal structure of primeval man is confined to a few 

 remains of bones, more particularly to two portions of skulls. Of 

 the more ancient of the two, the Engis skull, considered by Sir 

 Charles Lyell to be undoubtedly coeval with the mammoth and other 

 pleistocene mammalia, Prof. Huxley* says: "It is^ in fact, a fair 

 average human skull, which might have belonged; to a philosopher, 

 or might have contained the thoughtless brain, of a savage."+ 



The nature of the stone axes and arrow-headsj the flint-flakes, the 

 bone awls, &c., unearthed i by these discovei'ies, is sufficiently familiar 

 to the general reader, and it;is>only necessary to state that the earliest 

 specimens consist of u.npolished stones, rudely chipped to the required 



* Man's Place in Nature, p. 156. 



t The antiquity of the other relic, the Neanderthal »kuB;i which is "the mo»t pithecoid " of 

 IcnoTvn human crania, is not so well established; and Prof.. HuxUy himielf says (Man's Place 

 in Nature, p. 159), that "the fossil remains of man hitherto discovered do not seem to take u;i 

 appreciably nearer to the lower. pithecoid form." 

 4 



