Palcolitli and Ncolitli. — Claypole. 335 
and costly experience. From the naturally broken flint to the 
ground axe of greenstone may seem an easy transition, but 
historically it was long and difficult, the outcome of trials and 
failures innumerable, of changed environment, of conflict, 
struggle and death. 
Nor is this surprising to any one who notes the progress 
of mankind even at the present time. The history of science 
and art reveals a thousand cases in which men have so nar- 
rowly missed great discoveries or inventions that on looking 
back it seems impossible that they failed to see them. But so 
it was, and for another who came after were the renown and 
the recompense reserved. The effect of some preconceived 
idea, the limited reach of the human faculties, varying but 
never great, the difficulty of conceiving anything previously 
unknown, all these and other causes act as barriers in the way 
of progress which are only overpassed by some unusually 
gifted individual or broken down by the steady pressure of the 
general advance. 
Slower still, without any means of recording and transmit- 
ting his experience except by word of mouth, was the advance 
of our primitive ancestor and in the single fact that paleolithic 
man was able to spread over all the eastern hemisphere and 
perhaps the western also we may read the immense duration of 
palaeolithic time. By slow migration from land to land, con- 
testing the ground with his great mammalian competitors, 
he was able to cover the old world and to leave his tools and 
weapons in every land before he succeeded in making the 
seemingly small advance that carried him over the Ijarriers 
into neolithic time and neolithic conditions. 
It may be well in passing to state some of these proofs of 
great advance during the lapse of the long ages that are indi- 
cated by the profound gap existing between palseolothic and 
neolithic time in Great Britain. Besides the differences in the 
weapons and his implements already mentioned we know that 
palseolithic man in England knew nothing of the potter's art, 
he had not domesticated any of the brutes, his companions, he 
practised no agriculture, built no dwellings, and was probably 
quite ignorant of the bow and arrow and of navigation. .\11 
the advantages were possessed by neolithic man on his first 
appearance in the region. Add these facts to the former and 
