44 KEY. D. GATH WHITLEY, PRIMEVAL MAN IN BELGIUM. 
Geologie : — “ The great abundance of the articles of workmanship of 
Quaternary man and the remains of his hunting spoils which have 
survived to us, give a pretty clear picture of his civilisation and 
habits of life. The men were nomads and cave-dwellers of the 
lowest thinkable stage of culture ; the use of metals was unknown 
to them, and for a long time even that of pottery ; their tools and 
weapons were originally only rough-hewn flints and coarsely-worked 
bones. Towards the end of the Quaternary Period a certain sense of 
beauty and of art in the production of carefully designed weapons 
and implements, of carvings and drawings on stone, ivory and 
antlers began to develop itself among them. Instead of cooking- 
vessels made of clay, the earliest men made use of slates and sand- 
stone slabs ; agriculture was unknown to them, they lived by 
hunting, which they must have carried on very often in frightful 
conflict with the most powerful and gigantic representatives of the 
animal world with weapons of the most miserable description. 
“ The duration of the Palaeolithic Period must have been of very 
great length, since at the commencement of the Neolithic Period, 
with the animal and vegetable world standing so nearly related to 
the present, the climatic conditions, and with them the inhabitants 
of the continent, have been transformed, and have become pretty 
much those of to-day." 
All this seems to suggest that the more civilised cave-men of 
Belgium lived for the most part towards the end of the Quaternary 
Period. This point would receive some elucidation if Mr. Whitley 
could correlate the various articles of human workmanship with the 
successive layers of the cave-deposits, the existence of which he has 
noted in the case of the Goyet Cave. 
We may find an explanation of the “ Flood Period ” by referring 
it to the later stages of the Ice-Age (the “ jungdiluviale Steinzeit ” 
of the German investigators, the “ Magdalenien ” of the French), 
with the melting of vast regions of land-ice, and of the widespread 
snow-fields, which must have accompanied it outside the limits of 
the ice itself. Further, if (as is probable) Britain was joined to the 
continent of Europe, while the North Sea was blocked by the 
confluent glaciers from Scandinavia and from Scotland (as the late 
Professor Carvill-Lewis has shown on his maps and in his writings), 
the waters of the land and ice-blocked German Ocean stood probably 
high enough to cover the low plateaux referred to in Mr. Whitley’s 
