If mere rudeness is to be accepted as the indication of the first artless efforts of man to furnish himself with tools, the investigator into primeval history may assume that in the rudest of the drift and cave implements he has examples of the most infantile efforts in the industrial arts. He may even indulge the fancy that in the large, unshapely flint implements recovered from ossiferous caves and alluvial deposits, alongside of remains of the extinct fauna of a palæolithic period so dissimilar to any historical era, he has traced his way back to the first crude efforts of human art, if not to the evolutionary dawn of a semi-rational artificer. It is a significant fact that no such clumsy unshapeliness characterises the stone implements of the most degraded savage races. Examples may indeed be produced, selected for their rudeness, from among the implements of modern savages. But Bushmen, Patagonians, Mincopies, Australians, or whatever other race be lowest in the scale of humanity, each display ingenuity and skill in the manufacture of some special tools or weapons. Nor is it less worthy of note that the commoner implements and weapons of flint and stone recovered from ancient Scandinavian, Gaulish, and British graves, from the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the Danish shell-mounds, and other European depositories of prehistoric industrial art, are scarcely distinguishable from the flint-knives, scrapers, lance and arrow-heads, or the stone gouges, axes, and mauls, of the Red Indians, or of the Islanders of the Pacific. Peculiar types do indeed occur; and the materials abounding in special localities, such as the obsidian of Mexico, or the greenstone of Tasmania, give a specific character to the implements of some regions; but, on the whole, the arts of the stone periods of different races, however widely separated alike by space and time, present so many analogies that they seem to confirm the idea of certain instinctive operations of human ingenuity finding everywhere the same expression within the narrow range of non-metallurgic art. Few facts, therefore, related to this branch of the subject have impressed me more than the essentially diverse types characteristic of the massive and extremely rude implements of the caves and river-drift. They seem to point to some unexplained difference between the artificer of the Mammoth or Reindeer period, and the tool-maker of Britain’s neolithic era, or the Indian savage of modern times. [Illustration: FIG. 4.—Brixham Cave Flint Implement. (Evans). (½).]