THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT. 197 



thing in, perliaps paint to adorn themselves with. It is very 

 curious to find these French tribes going so far in the art of 

 shaping tools by grinding, and yet, so far as we know, never 

 catching- the idea of grinding a celt. 



The stone implements of the Scandinavian shell-heaps are a 

 good deal like those [of the Drift and the Caves, as regards 

 their flint-flakes and leaf-shaped instruments, but they are 

 characterized by the frequent occurrence of a kind of celt 

 which is not a Drift type. It is rudely shaped from the flint, 

 the natural fracture of which gives it a curved form which may 

 be roughly compared to that of a man's front tooth, if it ta- 

 pered from root to edge.^ Here, also, the Unground Stone 

 Age prevails, though a very few specimens of higher types 

 have been found. I may quote Mr. Christy's opinion that the 

 thousands of characteristic implements are to be taken as the 

 standard of what was made and used, while, as has very often 

 happened in old deposits lying in accessible situations, a few 

 things may have got in in comparatively modern times. 



Beside the want of grinding, the average quality of the 

 instruments of the Unground Stone Age is very low, not- 

 withstanding that its best specimens are far above the level of 

 the worst of the later period. These combined characters of 

 rudeness and the absence of grinding give the remains of the 

 Unground Stone Age an extremely important bearing on the 

 history of Civilization, from the way in which they bring to- 

 gether evidence of great rudeness and great antiquity. The 

 antiquity of the Drift implements is, as has been said, proved 

 by direct geological evidence. The Cave implements, even of 

 the reindeer period, are proved by their fauna to be earlier, as 

 they are seen at a glance to be ruder, than those of the crom- 

 lech period, and of the earliest lake-dwellings of Switzerland, 

 both belonging to the Ground Stone Age. To the student who 

 views Human Civilization as in the main an upward develop- 

 ment, a more fit starting-point could scarcely be ofi'ered than 

 this wide and well-marked progress from an earlier and lower, 

 to a later and higher, stage of the history of human art. 



1 Lubbock in Nat. Hist. Review, Oct. 1861. Morlot in Soc. Vaudoise des Sc. 

 Nat., 1859^.' 



