was walking beside the river and looking at the sunset clouds
in sky and water.

There in the pit lay the big bones. He saw them. Forgotten were
clouds and sky! He knew that he was looking at the bones of some
animal long since gone from the earth! For years after that, he
watched the work in the gravel pits and carried away any bones and
shaped stones that were dug out. He studied them and found that some
of the bones were those of the mammoth, and that there were bones of
the rhinoceros too.

At last he showed the bones and the stones to the learned men in Paris,
and said, "These stones are very old; they are as old as the ground in
which they lay. They were shaped by men who knew very little and had
very little, and who used them for weapons. Near the stone weapons
were these bones of the mammoth and the rhinoceros. So those animals
lived at the time the men did, and in this country."

The learned men listened, but did not believe what he said.

A few years after that, however,--about twenty years,--other shaped
stones were found on the banks of the river that flows by the great
city of London, in England, across the narrow water from France. And
in Denmark, another country near France, still more shaped stones were
found, and, with them, bones of the reindeer.

Then the learned men had to believe that men who shaped stones once
lived in England and France and Denmark; and that at the same time
lived the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer; and that the men
had very little and knew very little, and made the shaped stones for
weapons.

[Illustration: Picture of reindeer, scratched on slate; found in a cave
in France]

Soon after this, chipped stones were found all the world over. More
than that, there were people living who still were chipping them. The
Eskimo, who live in the frozen north of our own country, make their
weapons of stone.

[Illustration: Eskimo by their winter huts; drawn by an Eskimo]

So you see that by the Age of Stone is meant a time when the
metals--tin and copper and iron--were not known; and when stone, horn,
bone, shell, and wood were used for tools and weapons. The cave men
were in the Stone Age long ago. The Eskimo are in the Stone Age now.
And the American red men, though they were still in the Stone Age, were
beginning to learn the use of one metal--copper.

And the people of the shell mounds--how do we know about them? In
Denmark to-day you may see shell m