period. And with them we find ourselves in touch with the
existing development of our island. For an island it already was, and
with substantially the same area and shores and physical features as
we have them still. Our rivers ran in the same valleys, our hills rose
with the same contour, in those far-off days as now. And while the
place of flint in the armoury of Britain was taken first by bronze
and then by iron, these changes were made by no sudden breaks, but so
gradually that it is impossible to say when one period ended and the
next began.

B.2.--It is almost certain, however, that the Neolithic men were
not of Aryan blood. They are commonly spoken of by the name of
_Ugrians_,[7] the "ogres"[8] of our folk-lore; which has also handed
down, in the spiteful Brownie of the wood and the crafty Pixie of
the cavern, dimly-remembered traditions of their physical and mental
characteristics. Indeed it is not impossible that their blood may
still be found in the remoter corners of our land, whither they were
pushed back by the higher civilization of the Aryan invaders, before
whom they disappeared by a process in which "miscegenation" may well
have played no small part. But disappear they did, leaving behind them
no more traces than their flint arrow-heads and axes (a few of these
being of jadite, which must have come from China or thereabouts),
together with their oblong sepulchral barrows, from some of which the
earth has weathered away, so that the massive stones imbedded in it
as the last home of the deceased stand exposed as a "dolmen" or
"cromlech." But an appreciable number of the earthworks which stud our
hill-tops, and are popularly called "Roman" or "British" camps, really
belong to this older race. Such are "Cony Castle" in Dorset, and the
fortifications along the Axe in Devon.

B. 3.--During the neolithic stage of their development the Ugrians
were acquainted with but one metal, gold, and some of their stone
weapons and implements are thus ornamented. For gold, being at
once the most beautiful, the most incorruptible, the most easily
recognizable, and the most easily worked of metals, is everywhere
found as used by man long before any other. But before the Ugrian
races vanish they had learnt to use bronze, which shows them to
have discovered the properties not only of gold, but of both tin and
copper. All three metals were doubtless obtained from the streams of
the West. They had also become proficients, as t