Finally, the banqueters have left plenty of their knives lying about.  These good folk had their special and regular way of striking off a broad flat flake from the flint core; the cores are lying about, too, and with luck you can restore some of the flakes to their original position.  Then, leaving one side of the flake untouched, they trimmed the surface of the remaining face, and, as the edges grew blunt with use, kept touching them up with the hammer-stone—­there it is also lying by the hearth—­until, perhaps, the flake loses its oval shape and becomes a pointed triangle.  A third expert is called in, and has no difficulty in recognizing these knives as the characteristic handiwork of the epoch known as the Mousterian.  If one of these worked flints from Jersey was placed side by side with another from the cave of Le Moustier, near the right bank of the Vezere in south-central France, whence the term Mousterian, you could hardly tell which was which; whilst you would still see the same family likeness if you compared the Jersey specimens with some from Amiens, or from Northfleet on the Thames, or from Icklingham in Suffolk.

Putting all these kinds of evidence together, then, we get a notion, doubtless rather meagre, but as far as it goes well-grounded, of a hunter of the ice-age, who was able to get the better of a woolly rhinoceros, could cook a lusty steak off him, had a sharp knife to carve it, and the teeth to chew it, and generally knew how, under the very chilly circumstances, both to make himself comfortable and to keep his race going.

There is one other class of evidence on which the pre-historian may with due caution draw, though the risks are certain and the profits uncertain.  The ruder peoples of to-day are living a life that in its broad features cannot be wholly unlike the life of the men of long ago.  Thus the pre-historian should study Spencer and Gillen on the natives of Central Australia, if only that he may take firm hold of the fact that people with skulls inclining towards the Neanderthal type, and using stone knives, may nevertheless have very active minds; in short, that a rich enough life in its way may leave behind it a poor rubbish-heap.  When it comes, however, to the borrowing of details, to patch up the holes in the pre-historic record with modern rags and tatters makes better literature than science.  After all, the Australians, or Tasmanians, or Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so much is beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, are our contemporaries—­that is to say, have just as long an ancestry as ourselves; and in the course of the last 100,000 years or so our stock has seen so many changes, that their stocks may possibly have seen a few also.  Yet the real remedy, I take it, against the misuse of analogy is that the student should make himself sufficiently at home in both branches of anthropology to know each of the two things he compares for what it truly is.

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