must not, of course, be supposed
that this stage of human culture only began with the invasion of Europe.
Men would bring their rough art of fashioning implements with them, but
the southern regions are too little explored to inform us of the earlier
stage. But as man enters Europe he begins to drop his flints on a soil
that we have constant occasion to probe--although the floor on which
he trod is now sometimes forty or fifty feet below the surface--and we
obtain a surer glimpse of the fortunes of our race.

Most European geologists count four distinct extensions of the
ice-sheet, with three interglacial periods. It is now generally believed
that man came north in the third interglacial period; though some high
authorities think that he came in the second. As far as England is
concerned, it has been determined, under the auspices of the British
Association, that our oldest implements (apart from the Eoliths) are
later than the great ice-sheet, but there is some evidence that they
precede the last extension of the ice.

Two stages are distinguished in this first part of the Palaeolithic
Age--the Acheulean and Chellean--but it will suffice for our purpose to
take the two together as the earlier and longer section of the Old Stone
Age. It was a time of temperate, if not genial, climate. The elephant
(an extinct type), the rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the hyaena, and
many other forms of animal life that have since retired southward, were
neighbours of the first human inhabitant of Europe. Unfortunately, we
have only one bone of this primitive race, the jaw found at Mauer in
1907, but its massive size and chinless contour suggest a being midway
between the Java man and the Neanderthal race. His culture confirms the
supposition. There is at this stage no clear trace of fire, clothing,
arrows, hefted weapons, spears, or social life. As the implements are
generally found on old river-banks or the open soil, not in caves, we
seem to see a squat and powerful race wandering, homeless and unclad,
by the streams and broad, marshy rivers of the time. The Thames and the
Seine had not yet scooped out the valleys on the slopes of which London
and Paris are built.

This period seems, from the vast number of stone implements referred to
it, to have lasted a considerable time. There is a risk in venturing to
give figures, but it may be said that few authorities would estimate it
at less than a hundred thousand years. Man still advanced