Having glanced at method and sources, I pass on to results.  Some text-book must be consulted for the long list of pre-historic periods required for western Europe, not to mention the further complications caused by bringing in the remaining portions of the world.  The stone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (eos, Greek for dawn, and lithos, stone) the palaeolithic (pallaeos, old), and the neolithic (neos, new), and their numerous subdivisions, comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the early iron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history.  Here I shall confine my remarks to Europe.  I am not going far afield into such questions as:  Who were the mound-builders of North America?  And are the Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravels of California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man in the globe?  Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr. Henry Balfour at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and busy untold thousands of years ago.  Also, I shall here confine myself to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long pedigree of the species from which we are all sprung.

The antiquity of man being my immediate theme, I can hardly avoid saying something about eoliths; though the subject is one that invariably sets pre-historians at each other’s throats.  There are eoliths and eoliths, however; and some of M. Rutot’s Belgian examples are now-a-days almost reckoned respectable.  Let us, nevertheless, inquire whether eoliths are not to be found nearer home.  I can wish the reader no more delightful experience than to run down to Ightham in Kent, and pay a call on Mr. Benjamin Harrison.  In the room above what used to be Mr. Harrison’s grocery-store, eoliths beyond all count are on view, which he has managed to amass in his rare moments of leisure.  As he lovingly cons the stones over, and shows off their points, his enthusiasm is likely to prove catching.  But the visitor, we shall suppose, is sceptical.  Very good; it is not far, though a stiffish pull, to Ash on the top of the North Downs.  Hereabouts are Mr. Harrison’s hunting-grounds.  Over these stony tracts he has conducted Sir Joseph Prestwich and Sir John Evans, to convince the one authority, but not the other.  Mark this pebbly drift of rusty-red colour spread irregularly along the fields, as if the relics of some ancient stream or flood.  On the surface, if you are lucky, you may pick up an unquestionable palaeolith of early type, with the rusty-red stain of the gravel over it to show that it has lain there for ages.  But both on and below the surface, the gravel being perhaps from five to seven feet deep, another type of stone occurs, the so-called eolith.