30 
POPULAR SCIENCE REYIEW. 
TKUE AND FALSE FLINT WEAPONS. 
By N. WHITLEY, C.E. 
IIoN. Secretary to the Koyal Institution of Cornwall. 
I F we endeavour to trace backwards the history of mankind in 
Western Europe, we have to pass from the vividly written 
history of our own times, through the dimness which envelopes 
the fragmentary records of the earliest historians, to the dark- 
ness of improbable traditions and monstrous fables. But where 
written history fades away into fable, there archaeology steps 
forward with the materials for the construction of the history 
of an age of which no written records remain. The works of 
prehistoric man have been exhumed from peat bogs, sepulchral 
mounds, lake margins, caves, and gravel-beds ; and a flood of 
light has been thrown on the history of the past from these 
materials, more authentic than that which is written — more 
faithfully preserved than most of the manuscripts of antiquity. 
There is a fascination in the study of these monumental records 
which has lured us on to push our enquiries so far back into 
the past, that this additional light there also gradually fades 
away, until we reach the darkness which shrouds the study of 
liigh antiquity ; when doubts arise which have never been dis- 
pelled, and probably mistakes made which have yet to be 
rectified. 
Adopting for convenience the division of the stone period 
proposed by Sir John Lubbock, that of Palceolithic for the 
first stone age, embracing tlie chipped but unground implements 
from the Drift; and Neolithic for the second or more modern 
stone age, characterised by beautiful weapons and implements 
of polislied stone; we find the domestic history of the early 
races of man exhibited with much clearness throughout the 
whole of the Neolithic period. The barbed arrow-heads, the 
finely-chipped daggers, the ground axes and chisels, call for 
our a<liniration of the skill of the workman, considering the im- 
perfi ction of the tools he had, equally with the Sheffield cutlery 
of to-day. In the remains of the lake dwellings of Switzerland 
where poli.shed stone axes are abundant, we trace the outlines of 
