en centuries for the postdiluvian stone period in
Europe and Western Asia, a time quite sufficient in our view for all
that part of it represented by such monuments as the Danish
shell-heaps or the platform habitations of the Swiss lakes; leaving
the remains of the prehistoric caverns and river gravels for the
antediluvian period. A few facts in illustration of these points, and
also of the Biblical history, may be mentioned here.

We know perfectly that the early Chaldeans of the Euphratean valley
were acquainted with the use of metals--bronze certainly, and at a
very early date iron; yet flint knives and other implements of stone
are found under circumstances which show that they were used in the
palmy days of the Assyrian empire. The inhabitants of Egypt were
acquainted with bronze and iron long before the date of the Exodus,
yet the Egyptians used stone knives for some purposes up to a
comparatively modern time. Joshua used stone knives for the purpose of
circumcision; and according to Herodotus there were Ethiopians in the
army of Xerxes who used stone-tipped arrows. If any antiquarian were
to stumble on the "hill of the foreskins"--a mound under which were
buried in all probability the multitudinous flint flakes used in the
circumcision of the thousands of Israel--or the grave in which some of
the Ethiopian auxiliaries of Xerxes were buried with their flint
arrow-heads and javelins of antelopes' horn, how absurd would be the
inference that these repositories were of the palaeolithic age. Nay, so
late as 1870 a traveller was informed that the Bagos, a people of
Abyssinia, still made and used stone hatchets and flint knives.[121]

In Europe we find reason to believe that the Ligurians of Northwestern
Italy were flint-folk of very rude type until they were conquered by
the Gauls about 400 B.C.[122] Though the Gauls, Britons, and Germans
of the age of Julius Caesar had iron weapons, yet it is evident that
the metal was very scarce, and that bronze was more common; and in
confirmation of this it is found that in the trenches before Alize,
the Alesia of Caesar, where the final struggle of the Roman general
with Vercingetorix took place, weapons of stone, bronze, and iron are
intermixed. All over the more northern parts of Europe there is the
best reason to believe that the use of stone and bronze continued to a
much later period, and locally until long after the Christian era. It
is clear that such facts as these must