After centuries devoted to the elucidation of Roman remains, and the assignment to Roman artificers of much which more discriminating classification now awards to totally different workmen: the discovery of weapons and implements of stone, shell, or bone, in nearly every quarter of the globe, has at length excited a lively interest among the archæologists of Europe. Made, as these primitive relics are, of the most readily wrought materials, and by what may be styled the constructive instincts, rather than the acquired skill of their rude artificers, they belong to one condition of man, in relation to the progress of civilisation, though pertaining to many periods of the world’s history, and to widely separated areas. In one respect, however, those relics possess a peculiar value to the ethnologist. The materials employed in their manufacture have within themselves, most frequently, the evidence of their geographical origin, and in some of them also of their era. The periods to which numerous European relics pertain may frequently be determined, like those of older strata, by the accompanying imbedded or buried fossils. The bones of the _Bos primigenius_ have been found indented with the stone javelin of the aborigines of Northern Europe, and dug up even in places of regular British sepulture. Those of the _Megaceros Hibernicus_ seem, in like manner, to be traced to a period of ancient Irish colonisation, when flint-knives and stone hatchets prove the simple character of the native arts; though even then they furnished the material for constructing one of the earliest musical instruments. Yet other evidence shows that the same gigantic Irish deer was contemporary with the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, and the fossil carnivora of the caverns. The _Bos longifrons_, doubtless, traces its descent from an ancestry not less ancient; but from its wild herds the native Briton derived his domesticated cattle, and its most recent relics pertain to an era later than the Roman times. The ornamented tusks of the wild boar, the bones of the brown bear, the teeth and skulls of the beaver, carvings wrought from the walrus ivory, skates formed from the metatarsal and metacarpal bones of the red-deer and small native horse, with numerous kindred relics of palæontology within the era of the occupation of the British Islands by man, all serve to assign approximate dates to the examples of his ancient arts which they accompany.