186 Proceedings of tie Royal Irish Academy. 
any one set of occupiers, or tribe, ever tried to procure some of the 
better material in possession of any of their neighbours. Let the 
stone be good or bad, it appears to me that they just wrought what 
they had. The finding of flint so far away from its source was, I 
thought, an indication of commercial relations ; but I think another 
explanation may be given of that. In all the various stations, though 
the material used for weapons may be different, yet the weapons 
themselves were of the same kinds. The people seem to have had in 
every case similar habits, and to have used the same kinds of food. It 
does not seem to me that they were in the presence of a people of 
superior culture who had bronze or iron weapons. On the contrary, 
I believe they were masters in the country, and had perfect freedom 
to hunt the red deer, the wild boar, and other animals. 
Inside the boundary I have taken in we find flint implements 
most abundant in Antrim. They are found also in Derry and Down, 
and I have several good flint implements and flakes from Tyrone. 
They are also found in Fermanagh, and G. H. Kinahan has got flakes 
and implements in Donegal. Colonel Wood-Martin has found flakes 
of Antrim flint in the stone graves which he has excavated at Carrow- 
more. But did the people of the sand-hills penetrate inland, or was 
it a stone-age people of superior culture who came afterwards, and 
occupied the centre of our island ? Worsase says that the people of 
the early stone age in Denmark, by which he means the people who 
lived on the coast, and whose remains we find in kitchen middens, 
came from the coast of the Atlantic and ISForth Sea, and that people 
of a later stone age came afterwards, who had domestic animals, made 
finer implements, and erected large stone graves for their dead. This 
theory is of course questioned, but I believe at the first dawn of the 
ISTeolithic period the coast would be the natural road by which the 
first people would advance. Did the first wave of Neolithic people 
come from the southward, along the coast of France, and occupy the 
coasts of Denmark and the British Isles ? That is a question which 
I think further investigation of the sand-hills may help to solve. The 
mode of life and implements of the Danish and Irish coast-dwellers 
seem to have been so similar, that I believe them to have been the 
same people. A bronze pin has been found in some Scotch kitchen 
middens, and consequently some look on such articles as not being 
older than 800 or 900 a.d.^; but there are so many ways by v/hich 
metal objects could have been introduced, that I should like to have 
Fre historic Times, by Sir John Lubbock, 4th ed., p. 234. 
