not be strange
if palaeolithic man withdrew in their favour, because he could not
compete. Pre-history is at present almost silent concerning the manner
of his passing. In a damp and draughty tunnel, however, called Mas
d'Azil, in the south of France, where the river Arize still bores its
way through a mountain, some palaeolithic folk seem to have lingered
on in a sad state of decay. The old sureness of touch in the matter
of carving bone had left them. Again, their painting was confined to
the adorning of certain pebbles with spots and lines, curious objects,
that perhaps are not without analogy in Australia, whilst something
like them crops up again in the north of Scotland in what seems to
be the early iron-age. Had the rest of the palaeolithic men already
followed the reindeer and other arctic animals towards the north-east?
Or did the neolithic invasion, which came from the south, wipe out
the lot? Or was there a commingling of stocks, and may some of us have
a little dose of palaeolithic blood, as we certainly have a large dose
of neolithic? To all these questions it can only be replied that we
do not yet know.

No more do we know half as much as we should like about fifty things
relating to the small, dark, long-headed neolithic folk, with a
language that has possibly left traces in the modern Basque, who spread
over the west till they reached Great Britain--it probably was an
island by this time--and erected the well-known long barrows and other
monuments of a megalithic (great-stone) type; though not the round
barrows, which are the work of a subsequent round-headed race of the
bronze-age. Every day, however, the spade is adding to our knowledge.
Besides, most of the ruder peoples of the modern world were at the
neolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans.
Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, the
pile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a fresh
instance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another.

In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and there
on an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon,
just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk.
Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times and
the other in the life of to-day. When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored
in this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime's
Graves,