round-headed race of the bronze-age.  Every day, however, the spade is adding to our knowledge.  Besides, most of the ruder peoples of the modern world were at the neolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans.  Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, the pile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a fresh instance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another.

In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and there on an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon, just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk.  Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times and the other in the life of to-day.  When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored in this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime’s Graves, he had to dig out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped pit some forty feet deep.  Down at this level, it appeared, the neolithic worker had found the layer of the best flint.  This he quarried by means of narrow galleries in all directions.  For a pick he used a red-deer’s antler.  In the British Museum is to be seen one of these with the miner’s thumb-mark stamped on a piece of clay sticking to the handle.  His lamp was a cup of chalk.  His ladder was probably a series of rough steps cut in the sides of the pit.  As regards the use to which the material was put, a neolithic workshop was found just to the south of Grime’s Graves.  Here, scattered about on all sides, were the cores, the hammer-stones that broke them up, and knives, scrapers, borers, spear-heads and arrow-heads galore, in all stages of manufacture.

Well, now let us hie to Lingheath, not far off, and what do we find?  A family of the name of Dyer carry on to-day exactly the same old method of mining.  Their pits are of squarer shape than the neolithic ones, but otherwise similar.  Their one-pronged pick retains the shape of the deer’s antler.  Their light is a candle stuck in a cup of chalk.  And the ladder is just a series of ledges or, as they call them, “toes” in the wall, five feet apart and connected by foot-holes.  The miner simply jerks his load, several hundredweight of flints, from ledge to ledge by the aid of his head, which he protects with something that neolithic man was probably without, namely, an old bowler hat.  He even talks a language of his own.  “Bubber-hutching on the sosh” is the term for sinking a pit on the slant, and, for all we can tell, may have a very ancient pedigree.  And what becomes of the miner’s output?  It is sold by the “jag”—­a jag being a pile just so high that when you stand on any side you can see the bottom flint on the other—­to the knappers of Brandon.  Any one of these—­for instance, my friend Mr. Fred Snare—­will, while you wait, break up a lump with a short round hammer into manageable pieces.  Then, placing a “quarter” with his left hand the leather pad that covers his knee, he will, with an oblong