CHAPTER II ANTIQUITY OF MAN

History, in the narrower sense of the word, depends on written records.  As we follow back history to the point at which our written records grow hazy, and the immediate ancestors or predecessors of the peoples who appear in history are disclosed in legend that needs much eking out by the help of the spade, we pass into proto-history.  At the back of that, again, beyond the point at which written records are of any avail at all, comes pre-history.

How, then, you may well inquire, does the pre-historian get to work?  What is his method of linking facts together?  And what are the sources of his information?

First, as to his method.  Suppose a number of boys are in a field playing football, whose superfluous garments are lying about everywhere in heaps; and suppose you want, for some reason, to find out in what order the boys arrived on the ground.  How would you set about the business?  Surely you would go to one of the heaps of discarded clothes, and take note of the fact that this boy’s jacket lay under that boy’s waistcoat.  Moving on to other heaps you might discover that in some cases a boy had thrown down his hat on one heap, his tie on another, and so on.  This would help you all the more to make out the general series of arrivals.  Yes, but what if some of the heaps showed signs of having been upset?  Well, you must make allowances for these disturbances in your calculations.  Of course, if some one had deliberately made hay with the lot, you would be nonplussed.  The chances are, however, that, given enough heaps of clothes, and bar intentional and systematic wrecking of them, you would be able to make out pretty well which boy preceded which; though you could hardly go on to say with any precision whether Tom preceded Dick by half a minute or half an hour.

Such is the method of pre-history.  It is called the stratigraphical method, because it is based on the description of strata, or layers.

Let me give a simple example of how strata tell their own tale.  It is no very remarkable instance, but happens to be one that I have examined for myself.  They were digging out a place for a gas-holder in a meadow in the town of St. Helier, Jersey, and carried their borings down to bed rock at about thirty feet, which roughly coincides with the present mean sea-level.  The modern meadow-soil went down about five feet.  Then came a bed of moss-peat, one to three feet thick.  There had been a bog here at a time which, to judge by similar finds in other places, was just before the beginning of the bronze-age.  Underneath the moss-peat came two or three feet of silt with sea-shells in it.  Clearly the island of Jersey underwent in those days some sort of submergence.  Below this stratum came a great peat-bed, five to seven feet thick, with large tree-trunks in it, the remains of a fine forest that must have needed more or less