2 
velopment of the “ tool and weapon making art ” among the 
families of the human race—an art to which the highest instinct of 
the lower animals has never attained—an art so peculiarly charac¬ 
teristic of man that the presence of rudely-fashioned flint imple¬ 
ments in certain geological formations is considered to afford good 
and sufficient evidence of his existence at that remote period. 
The flint implements of the Drift, as a type, stand widely 
separated from all others ; the phase of mind which fashioned them 
has passed away—has become extinct, like many of the animals of 
the same period whose remains, in Cases M, N, and O, principally 
found in our immediate neighbourhood, have been so well cata¬ 
logued and described by Dr. H. P. Blackmore. But, with this 
single exception (and in the case of simple flint flakes even this 
exception does not hold good), the stone hatchet of pre-historic 
age, from tumulus or cromlech is, in point of form and material, 
still made by the modern savage; there is an identity in the mind 
which fashioned both, and further, both proclaim the fashioners to 
be in their “ stone age.” This “ stone age ” of a people may be 
of long or of short duration, according to the influence of many 
circumstances—its termination may be lost in the mists of the 
most remote antiquity, or it may still be unreached in this 19th 
century; yet the weapons and tools of the savage of to-day should 
be classed, not with breech-loading guns and rifled cannon, but 
with those rude weapons of the past which they most resemble— 
they belong to the same ethnological period, however widely sepa¬ 
rated by years. 
It is true that certain antiquarians have doubted whether there 
has been, in the history of most, if not of all nations, an age of 
stone, then an age of bronze, and lastly, an age in which iron 
superseded the use of the two former materials in the fabrication 
of tools and weapons. But, setting aside for the present what may 
be said respecting the Drift implements, and looking only to what 
may be termed geological evidence, all tends to establish the dis¬ 
tinct existence of these three periods, and the order of their 
sequence, although the transition from the one to the other was 
probably gradual and not abrupt, weapons of stone and cast bronze 
may have co-existed with a people at the end of their stone age, 
but not at its commencement; whilst weapons of malleable native 
metal may be held to belong to the “ stone age” proper, as having in¬ 
volved no metallurgic skill in their construction, the material being 
treated merely as the hardest variety of stone to be obtained in the 
neighbourhood. The Danish peat mosses are held to afford an 
instance of the use of stone implements preceding those of bronze. 
The Scotch fir has never, in historical times, grown in Denmark, 
yet large trunks of these trees, which had evidently grown on the 
spot, are found in the peat-mosses of that country. The Scotch 
fir appears, after a while, to have been supplanted by varieties of 
the oak, which, in their turn, have been superseded by the beech. 
The Danish and Swedish antiquaries and naturalists assign the 
