animals, he could have trusted only to swiftness and cunning" 

 for his safety ; no covering but the skins of the smaller ani- 

 mals he was enabled to catch and devour raw. Such must 

 have been the first appearance of man on the earth ; soon, 

 however, would his superior intelligence begin to assert itself. 

 His first attempt at self defence would be some knotted club. 

 He would then see, strewing the ground, the sharp flints which 

 now served only to wound his naked feet. The first step to 

 all arts, manufactures, and civilisation was made when the first 

 man struck the first blow in a crude attempt to fashion some 

 rough weapon from a flint 1 A jagged flint wedged in a cleft 

 stick would soon supersede the club and enable him to attack 

 animals more powerful than himself; his next step in advance 

 was kindling a fire, though at what period he first learnt to 

 do, or by what means he succeeded, we can never know, pro- 

 bably in the same way as some savage tribes in the present 

 day, by rubbing together two dry sticks. As this way is 

 tedious and uncertain, he must have endeavoured, as do 

 modern savages, to keep the flame burning by supplies of 

 resinons wood, &c., though it would probably uot occur to him 

 to adopt the ingenious device of the Faroe islanders, which is 

 to draw a wick through the body of the Stormy Petrel (a bird 

 containing a large per centage of fat) and light the end which 

 is left projecting at the beak! Primitive Man must soon have 

 attained great perfection in the only mechanism he practised, 

 namely fashioning tools and weapons of stone, for flint knives, 

 hatchets, spearheads, and arrow heads are found in enormous 

 numbers wherever pre-historic remains are met with. Pottery 

 was, probably, the next art learnt, for fragments of vessels, 

 rough and rude, with the marks of the primeval maker's fingers 

 still on them, were discovered in the cave of Nabuges, by the 

 side of a skull pierced with a flint arrow head, and other 

 remains. Caves were evidently used as shelter by these our 

 remote ancestors, probably after they had been evacuated by 

 their first tenants, which were hyaenas, bears, &c. ; and they 

 were also used as burial places, one of which was recently 

 discovered in France containing no less than 17 bodies, which 

 the over-zealous Mayor of Aurignac unfortunately ordered to 

 be buried in the parish churchyard, and they were thus for ever 

 lost to science ! Were the men of the Stone Age cannibals ? 



