eologist will not admit they can be in any way
human; he will have it that they were really the handiwork of the great
European anthropoid ape of that early period. This, however, is nothing
more than very delicate hair-splitting; for what does it matter whether
you call the animal that fashioned these exceedingly rough and
fire-marked implements a man-like ape or an ape-like human being? The
fact remains quite unaltered, whichever name you choose to give to it.
When you have got to a monkey who can light a fire and proceed to
manufacture himself a convenient implement, you may be sure that man,
noble man, with all his glorious and admirable faculties--cannibal or
otherwise--is lurking somewhere very close just round the corner. The
more we examine the work of our old master, in fact, the more does the
conviction force itself upon us that he was very far indeed from being
primitive--that we must push back the early history of our race not for
250,000 winters alone, but perhaps for two or three million years into
the dim past of Tertiary ages.

But if pre-Glacial man is thus separated from the origin of the race by
a very long interval indeed, it is none the less true that he is
separated from our own time by the intervention of a vast blank space,
the space occupied by the coming on and passing away of the Glacial
Epoch. A great gap cuts him off from what we may consider as the
relatively modern age of the mound-builders, whose grassy barrows still
cap the summits of our southern chalk downs. When the great ice sheet
drove away palaeolithic man--the man of the caves and the unwrought flint
axes--from Northern Europe, he was still nothing more than a naked
savage in the hunting stage, divinely gifted for art, indeed, but armed
only with roughly chipped stone implements, and wholly ignorant of
taming animals or of the very rudiments of agriculture. He knew nothing
of the use of metals--_aurum irrepertum spernere fortior_--and he had
not even learnt how to grind and polish his rude stone tomahawks to a
finished edge. He couldn't make himself a bowl of sun-baked pottery,
and, if he had discovered the almost universal art of manufacturing an
intoxicating liquor from grain or berries (for, as Byron, with too great
anthropological truth, justly remarks, 'man, being reasonable, _must_
get drunk'), he at least drank his aboriginal beer or toddy from the
capacious horn of a slaughtered aurochs. That was the kind of human
being wh