a museum, you are likely to remain cold to its charm. But probe about
in a gravel-bed till you have the good fortune to light on a
masterpiece; tenderly smooth away with your fingers the dirt sticking
to its surface, and bring to view the tapering or oval outline, the
straight edge, the even and delicate chipping over both faces; then,
wrapping it carefully in your handkerchief, take it home to wash, and
feast till bedtime on the clean feel and shining mellow colour of what
is hardly more an implement than a gem. They took a pride in their
work, did the men of old; and, until you can learn to sympathize, you
are no anthropologist.

During the succeeding main stage of the palaeolithic epoch there was
a decided set-back in the culture, as judged by the quality of the
workmanship in flint. Those were the days of the Mousterians who dined
off woolly rhinoceros in Jersey. Their stone implements, worked only
on one face, are poor things by comparison with those of late St. Acheul
days, though for a time degenerated forms of the latter seem to have
remained in use. What had happened? We can only guess. Probably
something to do with the climate was at the bottom of this change for
the worse. Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each big
freeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each fresh
return of milder weather. One of these floods, he thinks, must have
drowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coast
clear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture. Perhaps
they were coarser in their physical type as well.[1]

[Footnote 1: Theirs was certainly the rather ape-like Neanderthal
build. If, however, the skull found at Galley Hill, near Northfleet
in Kent, amongst the gravels laid down by the Thames when it was about
ninety feet above its present level, is of early palaeolithic date,
as some good authorities believe, there was a kind of man away back
in the drift-period who had a fairly high forehead and moderate
brow-ridges, and in general was a less brutal specimen of humanity
than our Mousterian friend of the large grinders.]

To the credit of the Mousterians, however, must be set down the fact
that they are associated with the habit of living in caves, and perhaps
may even have started it; though some implements of the drift type
occur in Le Moustier itself, as well as in other caves, such as the
famous Kent's Cavern near Torquay. Climate, once more, has very
possibly