“Evidence has been for twenty years or more in our possession (in the form of stone implements) of the existence of man in Europe in the warm period which preceded the Pleistocene, with its glacial clays and drifts and its gravels deposited on the sides of existing river valleys, sometimes 800 feet above the level of the bed to which the stream has now worn down its excavation, many miles wide. The discovery within the last four years of beautifully worked flint implements of the shape of an eagle’s beak (called ‘rostro-carinate’) and of other serviceable forms below the marine Pliocene shelly sands--known as the ‘Red Crag’ in Suffolk--separates the migrations and mixtures of human tribes and groups, of which we have any knowledge, by a huge chasm of geologic time from the date of the earliest European population. The best geologists have come to the conclusion that half a million years (and it may well be twice as many) separate us from the days before the Crag Sea laid down its shelly deposits on the East Anglian Coast. Yet there were skilful men--not mere ape-like creatures using sticks and roughly-broken stones, but men capable of making and admiring symmetrical, well-finished flint tools, and of using them to clean skins and to plane wood--living a human, creative, dominating life here in Western Europe in those immensely remote days. Probably enough, as great a period as separates those skilful men from us separated them from the earliest unskilful ‘commencing’ men of the tropical zone.” [Illustration: GOTHIC BRIDGE AT VILLENEUVE-SUR-LOT, FRANCE] Yes, probably enough, but yet we must not suppose that handicraft in Western Europe has ever had a standard of uniform merit. As our own work is very often inferior both to that of the Romans and to that of the Middle Ages, so the eagle-beaked tools may denote nothing more than a local industry which a man of genius had originated. No other implements have been dug up from Pliocene deposits in other European localities, hence students of art and architecture cannot accept the generalisation advocated by Sir Ray Lankester. As well suppose that the whole of Western Europe produced in the same age many painters equal to the Van Eycks, or many bridge-builders of a piece with Caius Julius Lacer, or the good Saint Bénézet. It is enough to believe that at a date to be known vaguely as 500,000 B.C., a craftsman of genius lived and laboured in a district of Western Europe, now called the East Anglian Coast. How far his influence extended, or how long it lasted, we have no inkling yet; but it may have been the influence, not of a rare genius, but of a school tradition which migrating tribes had spread through many parts of Europe. Anyhow, the eagle-beaks are historic facts and their manipulative skill gives us the right to make reasonable inferences.