the south between the stone and the iron phases."*

*Munro's Prehistoric Japan.

PRIMITIVE CULTURE

The neolithic sites occur much more frequently in the northern than
in the southern half of Japan. They are, indeed, six times as
numerous on the north as on the south of a line drawn across the main
island from the coast of Ise through Orai. The neighbourhood of the
sea, at heights of from thirty to three hundred feet, and the
alluvial plains are their favourite positions. So far as the
technical skill shown by the relics--especially the pottery--is
concerned, it grows higher with the latitude. The inference is that
the settlements of the aborigines in the south were made at an
earlier period than those in the north; which may be interpreted to
mean that whereas the stone-using inhabitants were driven back in the
south at an early date, they held their ground in the north to a
comparatively modern era.

That is precisely what Japanese history indicates. Jimmu's conquests,
which took place several centuries before the Christian era, carried
him as far as the Ise-Omi line, but Yamato-dake's expedition against
the Yemishi north of that line was not planned until the second
century after Christ. Apart from the rough evidence furnished by the
quality of the relics, calculations have been made of the age of an
important shell-heap by assuming that it originally stood at the
seaside, and by estimating the number of years required to separate
it by the present interval from the coast at a fixed annual rate of
silting. The result is from five thousand to ten thousand years. A
book (the Hitachi Fudoki), published in A.D. 715, speaks of these
kaizuka (shell-heaps) as existing already at that remote period, and
attributes their formation to a giant living on a hill who stretched
out his hand to pick up shell-fish. This myth remained current until
the eighteenth century, and stone axes exhumed from the heaps were
called thunder-axes (rai-fu) just as similar relics in Europe were
called elf-bolts or thunder-stones.

There is great diversity of size among the shell-heaps, some being of
insignificant dimensions and others extending to five hundred square
yards. They are most numerous in the eight provinces forming the
Kwanto. In fact, in these ancient times, the Yamato race and the
aborigines had their headquarters in the same localities,
respectively, as the Imperial and Feudal governments had in mediaeval
and modern times. But