that has entered into
the ideals of the English race can be fully accounted for only in the
light of home ideals. By such considerations, then, as have been thus
far set forth, we shall be guided in our endeavor to tell the story of
woman's life in the ages of Britain's history.

The people of the earliest part of the Pleistocene age had no real
home life, nor was there any social organization excepting that into
which men were forced by the necessity for mutual aid in the struggle
with the forces of savage nature. This element of self-protection was
the only factor that entered into the organized life of those earliest
inhabitants of Britain,--the people of the river-drift and the caves.
In this combat between savage man and savage beast were produced the
first instruments pointing to civilization,--weapons for defence and
offence.

The life of woman among the men of the river-drift was of the most
debased order. The only employment of the men was hunting the gigantic
savage beasts that ranged through the forests. While the males were in
pursuit of the rhinoceros, the lion, the hippopotamus, and the great
antlered deer that were a part of the fauna of the whole of that
section of the continent of Europe of which Britain in those remote
times formed a part, the females roamed through the densely wooded
forests whose only clearings were those made by the ravages of fire.
Clad in the skins of beasts but little lower in the scale of being
than themselves, and with their naked offspring about them, they
wandered about in search of berries or, with no better aids than
sharpened sticks, dug up the roots which they dried and stored for
the days when the results of the chase fell short of the needs of the
people. On the home-coming of the hunters to the place where, in their
nomadic wanderings, they had erected temporary shelters, the women
prepared the miserable meal. By skilfully rubbing together pieces
of hard wood, a fire was soon obtained; if fortune had attended the
chase, the hastily skinned animals were cut up with flint flakes,
and the meat was thrown upon the stones placed in the fire for that
purpose. There were no niceties of taste to be considered, so the
half-cooked and badly smoked flesh was snatched from the fire and
eaten with no more decorum than might be found in the meals of the
cave-hyena that, under the shadows of night, skulked through the
underbrush and noisily devoured the remnants of the hunters' fea