Much of the reasoning relative to the characteristics which archæological discoveries assign to man in his primeval stage originates in an illogical association of the concomitants of modern intellectual and social progress with the indispensable requisites implied in man’s primary condition as a rational being. It is not necessary for the confirmation of a primeval Stone or Flint Period, that we degrade man from that majestic genesis of our race, when he heard the voice of the Lord God amongst the trees of Paradise and was not afraid. Still less is it requisite that we make of him that “extinct species of anthropoid animal” hastily invented by over-sensitive Mosaic geologists to meet the problematic case of pleistocene products of art. In that primeval transition of the ethnologist in which geology draws to a close, and archæology has its beginning, amid all the rudeness of palæolithic art, we may still recognise the rational lord of creation, the being endowed, not with physical but moral supremacy; in whom intelligence and accumulated experience were to prove more than a match for all the brute force of those gigantic mammalia so familiar to us now in fossil disclosures of the drift-gravels and cave-earth. Even if no more is claimed for primeval man than a condition akin to that of many modern uncivilised races, we can still discern the new and higher order of beings for which all others were to make way. But if our modern technological standards are to be the only received tests of intellectual nobility, “his fair large front and eye sublime,” with all the suggestive picturings of Milton’s primeval man, are vain. His arts, though ample enough for all his wants, if tested by such standards, declare him no better than “the ignoble creature that arrow-heads and flint-knives would indicate.” He needed no weapons for war or the chase; implements of husbandry were scarcely less superfluous, amid a profusion ampler than the luxuriant plenty of the islands of the Southern Ocean. The needle and the loom were as foreign to his requirements as the printing-press or the electric telegraph. What use had he for the potter’s wheel, or the sculptor’s chisel, or the mason’s tools? And if his simple wants did suggest the need of some cutting implement, the flint-knife, or “Such other gardening tools as art, yet rude, Guiltless of fire, had formed,” harmonise with the simplicity of that primeval life, and its easy toils, far more naturally than the most artistic Sheffield cutlery could do, with all its requisite preliminary processes of mining, smelting, forging, grinding, and hafting the needless tool.