246 Original Articles. [April, 



formed articles of commerce ; wolves were not exterminated till after 

 Alfred's reign in the more civilized portion of the island, and at this 

 early time we find, besides all the still-existing deer and boar (the 

 wild beasts par excellence, the Greek 6r)p and cprjp, Lat. fera), the 

 great fossil elk, the reindeer, the goat, three kinds of wild oxen, the 

 auroch, or European bison, the brown bear, and the cave bear. 

 Fiercer and more formidable than these again were the hysenas a 

 rhinoceros, an elephant or two, it is said a mammoth, even a mastodon, 

 a tiger, and another beast of the same family, larger and more ter- 

 rible.* These had to be contended with by the early inhabitants of this 

 island ; these they subdued, and in many cases devoured. But though 

 such a diversity of animals stocked the land, food was not too plen- 

 tiful. Either man feared to taste the unknown flesh of many of these 

 quadrupeds, or he was unable frequently to master the larger or the 

 fiercer among them, with the ill-made and clumsy weapons he then 

 possessed. 



A mere taste for shell-fish would scarcely explain the large heaps 

 of their remains, principally those of periwinkles, but also whelks, 

 oysters, and scollops, that have been found in many parts of Scotland, 

 the Orkneys, Denmark, Scandinavia, and even the American coasts, 

 did we not remember that flint-tipped arrows and stone axes and ham- 

 mers would avail to kill but few deer, wild oxen, or wild horses, 

 whilst sheep were scarce, and whales but seldom floundered into creeks 

 or bays where they could be despatched by navigators of single-tree 

 canoes (Einbaum), fashioned by stone axe and hollowed by fire. 

 Wretched must have been the condition of these makers of the kitchen- 

 middens (Kjockkenmoeddinger), only to be compared in poverty, 

 though contrasting grandly in endurance, with the grub-eating savages 

 of Australia. 



There is a great interval between the chipped flints found in 

 earliest strata and the ground and polished celt or delicately-formed 

 arrowhead (compare Figures 6 and 7 with 1 and 2) ; besides two dis- 

 tinct modes of burial, both evidently belong to the Stone Age ; and 

 Dr. D. Wilsonf thinks, that he finds traces of an earlier race, whose 

 long, narrow, boat-shaped skulls denote a lower grade of civilization 

 concurrent with these rougher implements. To these people he would 

 attribute all the oldest and roughest remains of the Stone Age. The 

 editors;}: of the ' Crania Britannica,' on the other hand, see no distinc- 

 tion so decided as to warrant division of this kind from the small 

 amount of data as yet acquired. Where such authorities disagree, it 

 is not for us to decide ; at the same time, we cannot help thinking, 

 that the learned editors of the last-mentioned work have furnished 

 almost evidence enough to confirm Dr. Wilson's theory, whilst the 



* " In this island, anterior to the deposition of the drift, there was associated 

 with the great extinct tiger, bear, and hyaena of the caves in the destructive task 

 of controlling the numbers of the richly-developed order of the herbivorous 

 mammalia, a feline animal (the Machairodus latideus) as large as the tiger, and 

 to judge by its instruments of destruction, of greater ferocity." — Owen's 'Brit. 

 Fossil Animals,' p. 179. 



t Prehistoric Annals ° Scotland. % Messrs. J. Thurnam and J. D. Davis. 



