that any one ignorant of their history might easily mistake the greater number for common pieces of stone.  On the other hand, as we move on from the earlier to the later types of river-drift implements, we note how by degrees practice makes perfect.  The forms grow ever more regular and refined, up to the point of time which has been chosen as the limit for the first of the three main stages into which the vast palaeolithic epoch has to be broken up.  The man of the late St. Acheul period, as it is termed, was truly a great artist in his way.  If you stare vacantly at his handiwork in a museum, you are likely to remain cold to its charm.  But probe about in a gravel-bed till you have the good fortune to light on a masterpiece; tenderly smooth away with your fingers the dirt sticking to its surface, and bring to view the tapering or oval outline, the straight edge, the even and delicate chipping over both faces; then, wrapping it carefully in your handkerchief, take it home to wash, and feast till bedtime on the clean feel and shining mellow colour of what is hardly more an implement than a gem.  They took a pride in their work, did the men of old; and, until you can learn to sympathize, you are no anthropologist.

During the succeeding main stage of the palaeolithic epoch there was a decided set-back in the culture, as judged by the quality of the workmanship in flint.  Those were the days of the Mousterians who dined off woolly rhinoceros in Jersey.  Their stone implements, worked only on one face, are poor things by comparison with those of late St. Acheul days, though for a time degenerated forms of the latter seem to have remained in use.  What had happened?  We can only guess.  Probably something to do with the climate was at the bottom of this change for the worse.  Thus M. Rutot believes that during the ice-age each big freeze was followed by an equally big flood, preceding each fresh return of milder weather.  One of these floods, he thinks, must have drowned out the neat-fingered race of St. Acheul, and left the coast clear for the Mousterians with their coarser type of culture.  Perhaps they were coarser in their physical type as well.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Theirs was certainly the rather ape-like Neanderthal build.  If, however, the skull found at Galley Hill, near Northfleet in Kent, amongst the gravels laid down by the Thames when it was about ninety feet above its present level, is of early palaeolithic date, as some good authorities believe, there was a kind of man away back in the drift-period who had a fairly high forehead and moderate brow-ridges, and in general was a less brutal specimen of humanity than our Mousterian friend of the large grinders.]