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away the ground for assuming that the remains of man found 
in them must be coeval with the fossil bones or remains of 
extinct animals which occur in company with them. 
Having thus referred, perhaps hardly briefly enough on 
this occasion, to the alleged monuments of a supposed extreme 
antiquity, I will beg your permission to make a few remarks 
on another of the new doctrines on early archaeology, I mean 
that of periods marked by the use of particular materials, 
named the Stone period, the Bronze period, and the Iron 
period, and now further classed in sub- divisions of at least 
the two first. I have put on record my own protest against 
this system in a paper read before your Geological and 
Polytechnic Society and printed in its reports, and since 
reprinted in my two volumes of Archaeological Essays, and 
I have only to add that the more I have considered and 
examined it, the more I am satisfied of its entire want of 
truth. The principles of this system seem to be, that there 
was first a period, supposed to be of very great duration, in 
which stone was the only material used, to the exclusion of 
all metals ; that this was followed by a period in which 
bronze was the only metal used ; and that then came a period 
in which the use of bronze was superseded by that of 
iron. And now, further, these periods are divided into 1st, 
2nd, &c. Stone periods, or Bronze periods, in the belief that 
there is a distinction in the shape or make of the different 
objects which indicates different periods to which they belong. 
I will again state my objections to this system in as few 
words as I can. 
First, with regard to the so-called Stone period, I do not 
dispute that there may have been, and, in fact, I believe that 
there was, a remote period in which the best known material 
for the manufacture of weapons, or implements for cutting or 
hammering, was stone. When metal was either unknown, 
or could be obtained only with difficulty, three materials were 
G G 
