2 PREHISTORIC EUROPE. 



by the erosive and denuding action of waves, breakers, and 

 tidal currents, and by the increase of deltas. Neither do I 

 mean to give any account of those limited earth-movements, 

 which have here and there raised and depressed certain mari- 

 time districts of no great extent. Such geographical changes as 

 I shall refer to are those which have aided most considerably 

 in producing the present distribution of our fauna and flora. 

 And so with changes of climate, attention will be confined to 

 those which can be proved to have been more or less general, 

 and which in conjunction with great oscillations of the sea- 

 level have left abiding traces, not only in the living world, but 

 upon the features of the land itself. 



It is well known that when we try to trace the history of 

 any nation back into the past, we sooner or later come to a 

 period of myth and tradition, beyond which all seems impene- 

 trably dark. If, for example, we take the case of Britain, how 

 meagre, doubtful, and obscure, does the story become after it 

 has carried us back to the days of the Eomans ! We may be 

 able to determine with more or less probability whence the 

 people came who were natives of Britain at the time of the 

 Boman invasion ; but beyond that, who can venture into the 

 dark and hope to pick his way securely ? It is just here, how- 

 ever, where myth and tradition fail us, that the archaeologist 

 and geologist step forward to point out that all is not so irre- 

 coverably lost as historians at one time believed. We know 

 now that many long centuries before the advent of the Bomans, 

 our islands were occupied by a people whose knives and swords 

 were fashioned of bronze ; we know further that this people 

 was preceded by a race or races ignorant of the use of metals, 

 who lived during several considerable changes of climate and 

 oscillations of the sea-level; and we have also learned that at 

 a still remoter period, our country and the neighbouring parts 

 of Europe were tenanted by tribes of yet ruder barbarians, 

 during whose occupancy several extensive geological mutations 

 occurred. It is from a consideration of the extraordinary 

 vicissitudes of climate and the very considerable changes in the 



