THE LATER STONE AGE IN EUROPE.

IN seeking to show the place of Palæolithic man in the order and succession of life upon the earth, it was necessary to ascertain the relative position in geological time of the deposits in which evidences of his presence

occur.

But in treating of Neolithic man -man of that Newer Stone Age, the fundamental differences of which from the Older Stone Age have been referred to in a preceding paper-we best indicate his order in prehistoric time by reference to the advent into Europe of those earliest Aryan immigrants who confronted and commingled with the latest Neolithic peoples. Here no long or fitful breaks disturb the sequences of man's presence. With the Newer Stone Age begins the continuous history of civilization in Europe, for, although one race after another displaced or subdued its predecessors, advance in culture was only locally arrested, and was fostered by peaceful trading intercourse between east and west, between the barbarians of the north and the more advanced races of Central and Southern Europe.

It is about fifty years ago that Dr. Prichard, whose work on the Physical Races of Mankind did good service in its day, published an essay on the Eastern Origin of the Keltic Nations, pp. 40, 41. In this essay he

sketched the main features of the evidence then producible in support of the descent of these nations from a common ancestry, whose primitive home, although its site cannot be accurately determined, was probably on the wide plains spreading east of the Caspian Sea and north-west of Hindustan. That evidence, which has been enormously increased since Dr. Prichard's days, is, with rare exceptions, accepted by the leading authorities of our time as conclusive.

In an article contributed by Professor Max Müller to the Oxford Essays for 1856, and since republished in his Chips from a German Workshop, an admirable summary of the matter is given, as also a sketch of the state of civilization under which the ancestors of the now wide-spread Aryan or Indo-European races lived thousands of years ago.

Many readers of that brilliant paper will remember the surprise with which they learnt that, although a people may leave behind them no material remains, such as the famous empires of the East have left, there may survive indisputable evidence that they once lived. For it is not by means of relics in tombs or mounds, nor by aid of history stamped on tablets of baked clay, or cut on the face of rocks, nor by picture-words painted on the walls of temples now choked with the drifted sand of centuries, but by the help of language alone, that we can rebuild the villages and revivify the institutions of the old Aryan land. A careful analysis of words, and of the roots from which they spring, supplies proof that from the dialects

of these Aryan forefathers there have descended, varied by ascertained laws, the rich and vigorous languages in which the Vedas-most ancient of sacred scriptures the Iliad, the Divina Commedia, the Gothic Bible of Ulphilas, and the plays of Shakespeare are written, and that the Aryans had obtained so advanced a state of civilization, that probably even with them the Stone Age, with its relics yet around them, was a pre-historic time.

The tribes, speaking their different dialects of a common tongue, appear to have consisted of two great branches, from one of which have descended the races that now people, with, of course, much admixture, nearly the whole of Europe, while from the other branch the Hindus and Persians, with some lesser peoples in Asia, have sprung. Among the earliest to swarm from the parent tribe were the Keltic tribes, who in their ever westward course, driven onward by succeeding emigrants, were finally pushed into northwestern Europe, where they became for long centuries the dominant race. At this point there arises the question, who did they find here? Did the Kelt set his foot upon a virgin soil, or follow the track of earlier footprints of pre-Keltic races? and, if so, what can be learned about them? Here comparative philology, which has traced the Kelt from the plateaus of Central Asia to the mountain-fastnesses of Wales, fails us, and the pickaxe must be taken in hand.

Since the mass of material thus unearthed is enormous and perplexing, and as the purpose of this

sketch is only to point the direction in which the student of primitive culture should go, we will summarise the various places in which the remains occur, then the remains themselves, and finally the presumed features of the races which have bequeathed themraces possibly to be identified with peoples overlapping the more strictly historic period.

Neolithic implements are not found in deep-lying or sealed deposits, but either on the surface or among easily accessible remains. When the recollection of the Stone Age passed away, men looked with superstitious veneration on the unknown objects, often of delicate and exquisite shape, which they found on the surface of the soil, or turned up in ploughing and digging. For ages it has been a widespread belief among the ignorant that with the flash of lightning there fell a solid body, which is called the thunderbolt or thunderstone, as expressed in the dirge in Cymbeline":

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Fear no more the lightning flash,

Nor the all-dreaded thunderstone;

and it is these Neolithic relics to which such celestial origin has been assigned. They were known to the Greeks and Romans as thunderbolts; the natives of the Gold Coast, who find them lying on the ground, after heavy rains have washed away the film of upper soil, so regard them, using them as medicine by

1 A large body of valuable information concerning these superstitions is given by M. Cartailhac in "L'Age de la Pierre dans les Souvenirs et les Superstitions populaires." (Paris: Reinwald.)

scraping the dust from them into water, aud laying them in places sacred to the gods. In Brittany the travelling umbrella-mender inquires on his rounds for pierres de tonnerre, and takes them in payment for repairs. According to Pliny, the polished stone axes were used as charms against fire or shipwreck, and for insuring a successful lawsuit; they were the sweeteners of sleep, and added to the melody of song. In India they are valued as charms whose possession brings good luck to their owner, whose loss is the signal of his illfortune. Flint arrow-heads, called elf-darts by the country folk, have been found, mounted in bronze or in the precious metals, among Etruscan and other relics, evidently to be worn as talismans; and occasionally stone implements are discovered with mystic characters engraved upon them, as in the well-known case of the polished jade celt or ceraunia, inscribed with a Gnostic formula in Greek, preserved in the Christy Collection.

This, however, by the way. In addition to lying scattered in enormous numbers over the surface of the globe, Neolithic implements are found in kitchenmiddens and coast-finds, in earth and stone monuments, and in lake dwellings. The coast-finds, or flintfinds, are collections of rudely-worked flints lying near the sea-shore in Denmark and the northern parts of this island, and corresponding exactly to similar heaps on the American coasts. Their rough character has led some antiquaries to assign them to the Palæolithic age, or, if Prof. Mantorani's suggestion be adopted, to