THE STONE AGE — PAST AND PRESENT," 203 



that it goes far to neutralize their value as distinctive of dif- 

 ferent races. It is clear that no great help in tracing the 

 minute history of the growth and migration of tribes^ is to be 

 got from an arrow-head which might have come from Pata- 

 gonia, or Siberia, or the Isle of Man, or from a celt which 

 might be, for all its appearance shows, Mexican, Irish, or 

 Tahitian. If an observer, tolerably acquainted with stone 

 implements, had an unticketed collection placed before him, 

 the largeness of the number of specimens which he would not 

 confidently assign, by mere insjoection, to their proper coun- 

 tries, would serve as a fair measure of their general uniformity. 

 Even when aided by mineralogical knowledge, often a great 

 help, he would have to leave a large fraction of the whole in 

 an unclassed heap, confessing that he did not know within 

 thousands of miles or thousands of years, where and when 

 they were made. 



How, then, is this remarkable uniformity to be explained ? 

 The principle that man does the same thing under the same 

 circumstances will account for much, but it is very doubtful 

 whether it can be stretched far enough to account for even the 

 greater proportion of the facts in question. The other side of 

 the argument is, of course, that resemblance is due to con- 

 nexion, and the truth is made up of the two, though in what 

 proportions we do not know. It may be that, though the pro- 

 blem is too obscure to be worked out alone, the uniformity of 

 development in dififerent regions of the Stone Age may some 

 day be successfully brought in with other lines of argument, 

 based on deep-lying agreements in culture, which tend to 

 centralize the eai4y history of races of very unlike appearance, 

 and living in widely distant ages and countries. 



To turn to an easier branch of the subject, I have brought 

 together here, as a contribution to the history of the Stone 

 Age, a body of evidence which shows that it has prevailed in 

 ancient or up to modern times, in every great district of the 

 inhabited world. By the aid of this, it may be possible to 

 ^ketch at least some rude outline of the history of its gradual 

 decline and fall, which followed on the introduction of metal in 

 later periods, up to our own times, when the universal use of 



