ipped of these, society takes a ruder shape. But it is
still not rude enough to be primitive. There are parts of the earth's
surface, at the present moment, where the metals are unknown. There was,
probably, a time when they were known nowhere. Hence, the influences of
such a knowledge as this must be subtracted. And then come weaving and
pottery, the ruder forms of domestic architecture, and boat-building,
lime-burning, dyeing, tanning, and the fermentation of liquors. When and
where were such arts as these wanting to communities? No man can answer
this; yet our methods of investigation require that the question should
be raised.

Other questions, too, which cannot be answered must be suggested, since
they serve to exhibit the trains of reasoning that depend upon them. Was
Britain (a question already indicated) cut off from Gaul by the Straits
of Dover when it was first peopled? If it were, the civilization
required for the building of a boat must have been one of the attributes
of the first aborigines; so that, whatever else in the way of
civilization may have been evolved on British ground, the art of
hollowing a tree, and launching it on the waves was foreign.

Now it is safe to say that the writers who are most willing to assign a
high antiquity to the first occupation of the British Isles by Man,
have never carried their epoch so high as the time when Britain and
Gaul were joined by an isthmus. On the contrary, they all argue as if
the islands were as insular as they are at present, and attribute to the
first settlers the construction and management of some frail
craft--rude, of course, but still a seaworthy piece of mechanism--after
the fashion of the boats of Gaul or Germany; and this is the reasonable
view of the subject.

In Mr. Daniel Wilson's "Pre-historic Annals of Scotland," we have the
best _data_ for the next portion of the question, viz., the extent to
which geological changes have occurred since the first occupancy of our
islands. In the valley of the Forth,[1] alterations in the relations of
the land and sea to the amount of twenty-five feet have occurred since
the art of making deers' horns into harpoons was known in Scotland. Such
at least is the inference from the discovery, in the Carse lands about
Blair Drummond Moss, of the skeleton of a whale, with a harpoon beside
it, twenty-five feet above the present tides of the Forth. As much as
can be told by any single fact is told by this; its valuati