But long before ever the Phœnician ships came to the shores of Northern Europe there were boats and sailing ships. No doubt the prehistoric man in the north was driven to finding some means of transportation across the fjord by the same stern mother Necessity that first induced that primitive whom we saw learning his elementary seamanship on the Tigris or Euphrates. That ancient Northerner of the Stone Age made a wonderfully historic discovery when he found that he could make an edge to his stone, and that thereby he was able to cut both flesh and wood. “For,” says Mr. Eiríkr Magnússon in his interesting essay,[26] “on the edge, ever since its discovery, has depended and probably will depend to the end of time the whole artistic and artificial environment of human existence, in all its infinitely varied complexity.... By this discovery was broken down a wall that for untold ages had dammed up a stagnant, unprogressive past, and through the breach were let loose all the potentialities of the future civilisation of mankind. It was entirely due to the discovery of the edge that man was enabled, in the course of time, to invent the art of shipbuilding.” The monoxylon—the boat made from one piece of timber—as fashioned by the early sailorman of the Stone Age, is even still used in parts of Sweden and Norway. Indeed it still bears the name which is the equivalent of “oakie,” showing that it was originally made out of the oak-trunk, which is the thickest and therefore the most suitable trunk to be found in the forests of the North Sea coast, a region, that in the time of the Stone Age was densely wooded with oak trees. Afterwards, this monoxylon or dug-out, in order that she may be made so strong as to carry as many as forty men, is strengthened with ribs, and the flat bottom has the modification of a keel added. The vessel that was found at Brigg in Lincolnshire in May 1886 (_see_ Fig. 25) is of this kind. A similar kind of boat was found in the Valdermoor marsh in Schleswig-Holstein during the year 1878, and is now in the Kiel Museum. As there are other similar boats in existence, perhaps it may interest the reader if we deal with these discoveries a little more fully. The Valdermoor boat has the following dimensions: length 41 feet, greatest width 4.33 feet, depth inside 19 inches, depth outside 20½ inches. The thickness of the wood is 1½ inches at the bottom and 1¼ at the top. The boat had eleven ribs, of which nine now exist. On the gunwale between the ribs, eleven holes were made for inserting oars. Both the stem and stern are sharp. The keel, 6½ feet in length, is worked out of the wood at both ends of the boat, leaving the middle flat. I am sorry not to be able to present an illustration of this before the reader, but the director of the Kiel Museum informs me that the boat is in such a position as to prevent it being photographed.