All around us in England, in Devonshire, in Torquay, and all over the globe, lie the memorials of human beings, of whose day and generation the oldest historical records we possess know absolutely nothing. Here and there the tale is told by a heap of shells. From such heaps we know what dishes were served at the Dane’s dinner-table, at a time when cereal crops were unknown in Denmark, and sea-weed was used instead of salt[46]. Oysters and cockles, mussels and periwinkles, seem to have been _ad libitum_; the stag, the roe-deer, and the wild boar were at the service of that ancient Dane as often as he could catch them with his weapons of wood, stone, horn, or bone[47]; when pork and venison were scarce, his palate could content itself with dog or fox. From the waters of the mountain-lake, from the centre of the high-piled barrow, in the circles of giant stones upon broad-stretching plain or wild moorland, from peat-moss and railway-cutting and limestone cavern, we obtain, as Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Pengelly and others have so well shown, the unwritten records of prehistoric man, of human beings unnoticed in any credible history, and preceding all well-established definite historical dates whether of sacred or profane literature. Who reared the Titanic monuments of Stonehenge and Abury we know not. We know not who constructed the extraordinary animal-mounds of Wisconsin in North America--mounds hundreds of feet long, reared a few feet above the level plains, in the figures of men and beasts and birds and reptiles. These monuments, if such they were intended to be, must have demanded prodigious industry for their construction. They imply a considerable population, and some advance in artistic skill. But why they were designed, and who designed them, are circumstances alike unknown. It is necessary to press home this argument founded upon our ignorance, and to dwell upon it with some emphasis, because numbers of persons are pleased to imagine and assert that, within two or three thousand years before the Christian era, the whole human population of the globe was as it were still in the bud, and that from a single family, not mustering a dozen members to start with, all its tribes have since then been derived, with their endless diversities of features, hair, complexion, customs, tastes, and other qualities both of mind and body. According to the old chronology we are to suppose that within this limited space of time, from under a single roof, the children went forth, spreading over all lands, not only miraculously forgetting the common ancestral language, but forgetting the arts, the traditions, the sentiments, which they had in common, retrograding in some cases into a savage ferocity or an almost imbecile simplicity, in others retaining or developing forms of an advanced civilization. Esquimaux and Hottentots, Japanese and Red Indians, the Negro and the Greek, are thus united in ties of cousinship by no means remote.