We may now turn to a consideration of these various epochs in their order. Firstly the Stone Age. This, though a convenient term as covering all the period before the advent of the Metal Ages, is too indefinite both as to time and race, and hence it is usual to speak of the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age, and the Neolithic or New Stone Age. The people of these two Ages were very distinct, and most authorities hold that--at all events in our land--a vast gap of time separated them, though no such gap occurred between the later Ages. Palaeolithic man, from various causes, ceased to inhabit what we now call Britain, and when the country was re-peopled it was by Neolithic man. Palaeolithic man lived in the days when the mammoth, reindeer, and hyaena roamed over our country; made leaf-shaped roughly-flaked flint weapons which were never ground or polished; cultivated no plants and tamed no animals; and built no monuments, graves, or houses. Neolithic man, on the other hand, learnt how to grind and polish his implements; was both a farmer and a breeder of stock; had many industries; and built megalithic monuments, houses, and graves--the remains of which survive to the present day. The earliest signs of the existence of man in Berkshire are, as we have said, the implements of stone, mostly flint, found in the gravels; and the implements of the Palaeolithic Period take us back to a very old time, so old that the surface features of our district were then quite different from what we see now. There is a fine series of Palaeolithic implements in the Reading Museum, and most of them have been found in gravel-pits near the river Thames in the Reading and Twyford district, or in the Cookham and Maidenhead district. The implements occur in the gravel in such a way as to prove that they were brought into the position in which we find them at the same time and in the same manner as the other stones in the gravel, and the men who made them consequently lived at or before the date of the making of the beds of gravel. All the gravels in question were made by our rivers, and as the places where we find the implements are in some cases from 85 to 114 feet above the present level of the river, we infer that the valley has been deepened as much as from 85 to 114 feet since the time when the men who made the implements lived. We now come to the Neolithic Period when, as we have seen, man was a much more civilised person than the earlier man is believed to have been. Some of his burial mounds still remain, and being oval in plan are known as long barrows. Wayland Smith's Cave, a mile to the east of Ashbury (p. 83), is composed of some 32 stones, the remains of a long barrow of Neolithic times.