This peep into the aboriginal mind reveals a dire stagnation. But although no other thing in Nature is less uncommon than human initiative, yet the men of the eagle-beaked tools may have made tree-bridges, and also such stone bridges as the lintel-slabs at Wycollar (p. 60). For this work required nothing more than imitation, while the eagle-beaks added some invention to a deft handicraft. Many an earthquake had made a slab-bridge, and other models were formed by the lava from volcanoes which hardened into a thick crust over many gaps in the land. From these bridges--a tree cut down with a flint axe, and a single boulder or slab laid from bank to bank of a stream--came three lines of descent in very slow, yet fertile handicraft; and to the history of each a long book could be given. Let me name them one by one:-- 1. The Slab-bridge with stone piers. 2. The Tree-bridge with stone piers. 3. The Tree-bridge with timber piles. III THE SLAB-BRIDGE WITH STONE PIERS In this we follow an evolution from unhewn fragments of rock upheld by stepping-stones to Cyclopean slabs of hewn granite and marble supported by well-made stone piers. The halting development of this bold stonecraft was loved and fostered by that original people which for convenience we call Iberian, and which at some unknown period migrated from Asia, “and swept round Europe, whilst a second branch colonised the Nile basin and Northern Africa, and a third streamed east and occupied China and Japan. The master idea in the religion of this people was the cult of ancestors, and the rude stone monuments, menhirs, cromlechs, and kistvaens they have left everywhere, where they have been, all refer to commemoration of the sacred dead. The obelisk in Egypt is the highly refined menhir, and the elaborate, ornamented tombs of the Nile valley are an expression of the same veneration for the dead, and belief in the after life connected with the tomb, that are revealed in the construction of the dolmen and kistvaen.”[39]