y of man is free from doubt and
difficulty, but the doubt and difficulty are not confined to the
"orthodox." For the inferences to be drawn from the exhumed remains are
equally doubtful whatever views be adopted.

I shall not go into great length on this subject, partly because some
recent popular tracts of Canon Rawlinson, Mr. R.S. Pattison, and others,
have already made the ordinary reader familiar with the main outlines of
the subject; and still more because, be the views of archaeologists what
they may, it is impossible for any rational person to contend either
that they can be reduced to anything like unity among themselves, or
that they lead to any conclusion favourable to the belief in the
self-caused and undesigned evolution of man.

It may be regarded as known, that at the dawn of history, mankind was
passing through what may be called a Bronze age, in which weapons of
bronze were used before tools of iron were invented. But this age was
preceded by one in which even bronze was unknown. Stone implements, and
some of bone and horn, were alone used. It is also well ascertained that
there were two _widely divided_ stone ages. The latter, distinguished by
the polishing of the stones, is described as the _neolithic_; the
former, in which flint and other hard stone fragments were merely
chipped or flaked to an edge, is called the _palaeolithic_.

It is hardly contended that the neolithic age could have been more than
four or five thousand years ago. There is always the greatest difficulty
in fixing any dates because from the nature of the case written records
are absent, and the stages of growth in the history of peoples overlap
so.

We know that sharp flakes of stone were still used for knives in the
time of Moses and Joshua. We are not out of the stone age yet, as
regards some portions of the globe; and it is quite possible that parts
of the earth, not so very remote, may have been still in the midst of a
stone age when Assyria, Chaldaea, and Egypt were comparatively highly
civilized.

It is also fairly certain that between the neolithic or smooth-stone
age, and the palaeolithic, certain important geological changes took
place, though those changes were not such as to have demanded any very
great length of time for their accomplishment.

The palaeolithic stone implements are found in river gravels and clays,
along the higher levels of our own Thames Valley, that of the Somme in
France, and in other places. T