o alone inhabited France and England during the later
pre-Glacial period.

A hundred and seventy thousand years elapse (as the play-bills put it),
and then the curtain rises afresh upon neolithic Europe. Man meanwhile,
loitering somewhere behind the scenes in Asia or Africa (as yet
imperfectly explored from this point of view), had acquired the
important arts of sharpening his tomahawks and producing hand-made
pottery for his kitchen utensils. When the great ice sheet cleared away
he followed the returning summer into Northern Europe, another man,
physically, intellectually, and morally, with all the slow accumulations
of nearly two thousand centuries (how easily one writes the words! how
hard to realise them!) upon his maturer shoulders. Then comes the age
of what older antiquaries used to regard as primitive antiquity--the age
of the English barrows, of the Danish kitchen middens, of the Swiss lake
dwellings. The men who lived in it had domesticated the dog, the cow,
the sheep, the goat, and the invaluable pig; they had begun to sow small
ancestral wheat and undeveloped barley; they had learnt to weave flax
and wear decent clothing: in a word, they had passed from the savage
hunting condition to the stage of barbaric herdsmen and agriculturists.
That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must
conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn't to be measured by mere
calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand
years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what
looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere
in the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail to get the
reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we
saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.

On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving from
the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this
essay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet,
produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,
and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of
the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and
it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of
prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now
serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, and
more ineffective