of that remote epoch was moving at all. If we could see
their work in wood, we might discern a more diversified skill or we
might not. As it is, we can but conclude in the light of our very
imperfect knowledge that in mind no less than in body mankind of Early
Palaeolithic times displayed a fixity of type almost amounting to that
of one of the other animal species.

During Middle Palaeolithic times the Mousterian culture rules without a
rival. The cave-period has begun; and, thanks to the preservation of
sundry dwelling-places together with a goodly assortment of their less
perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the
home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations
in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should
like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand
experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was
almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human
deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and
the fact that they fall into two strata separated by a sterile layer
that appears to consist of the dust of centuries points to a very long
process of accumulation. Yet though there is one kind of elephant
occurring amid the bone refuse at the bottom of the bed, and another
and, it would seem, later kind at the top, one and the same type of
flint instrument is found at every level alike; and the only development
one can detect is a certain gain in elegance as regards the Mousterian
'point', the reigning substitute for the former _coup-de-poing_. Once
more there is intensive progress only, so far at least as most of the
Jersey evidence goes. One _coup-de-poing_, however, and that hardly
Acheulean in conception but exactly what a hand accustomed to the
fashioning of the Mousterian 'point' would be likely to make by way of
an imitation of the once fashionable pattern, lay at lowest floor-level;
as if to remind one that during periods of transition the old is likely
to survive by the side of the new, and may even survive in it as a
modifying element. As a matter of fact, the _coup-de-poing_ is frequent
in the earliest Mousterian sites; so that we cannot but ask ourselves
how it came to be in the end superseded. Whether the Mousterians were of
a different race from the Acheuleans is not known. Certain it is, on the
other hand, that the industry that makes its first appearance in