rich enough life in its way may leave behind it a
poor rubbish-heap. When it comes, however, to the borrowing of details,
to patch up the holes in the pre-historic record with modern rags and
tatters makes better literature than science. After all, the
Australians, or Tasmanians, or Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so much
is beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, are our
contemporaries--that is to say, have just as long an ancestry as
ourselves; and in the course of the last 100,000 years or so our stock
has seen so many changes, that their stocks may possibly have seen
a few also. Yet the real remedy, I take it, against the misuse of analogy
is that the student should make himself sufficiently at home in both
branches of anthropology to know each of the two things he compares
for what it truly is.

* * * * *

Having glanced at method and sources, I pass on to results. Some
text-book must be consulted for the long list of pre-historic periods
required for western Europe, not to mention the further complications
caused by bringing in the remaining portions of the world. The
stone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (_eos_, Greek
for dawn, and _lithos_, stone) the palaeolithic (_pallaeos_, old),
and the neolithic (_neos_, new), and their numerous subdivisions,
comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the early
iron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history. Here I shall
confine my remarks to Europe. I am not going far afield into such
questions as: Who were the mound-builders of North America? And are
the Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravels
of California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man in
the globe? Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the
dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour
at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there
by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the
solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and
busy untold thousands of years ago. Also, I shall here confine myself
to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long
pedigree of the species from which we are all sprung.

The antiquity of man being my immediate theme, I can hardly avoid saying
something about eoliths; though the subject is one that invariably
sets pre-historians at each other's throats. There are