As a preliminary to dealing below with the story of “the Neander Men”—to which race the newly-found skull and bones from the Corrèze belong—it will help to make the importance of that skeleton obvious if I very briefly and dogmatically state what are the great periods in the prehistoric record of man, and the probable distance in time from us of those periods. It must be remembered that what I have to say applies only to the “prehistoric history” of man in Western Europe and the Mediterranean region, for it is only this part of the world which has been sufficiently carefully examined to yield any definite conclusions. Let us suppose that we can travel back through the ages, and proceed to do so. We find that there are three well-marked successive periods in Europe—which are called the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, and the Stone Age. When we go back to Julius Cæsar conquering Gaul and parts of Germany and Britain, we find that the Romans had steel swords, and freely made use of that metal for a variety of tools and constructive purposes. The Gauls and Belgi and Allemanni and Britons were still in the Bronze Age; they had beautifully made bronze swords and daggers and helmets and shields, which were weaker and softer than those of iron used by the Romans. The use of iron was soon spread by the conquerors, and the rest of Europe entered on the Iron Age. When the Anglo-Saxons arrived in England they had iron weapons. At what date precisely the Romans themselves took to the use of iron is not known, probably they learnt its use from the peoples of Africa; but at no distant date, a few hundred years before Christ, they, too, and the Greeks were in the Bronze Age. In Western Europe we see the Bronze Age, as we travel back in time, disappearing, and we come to the Stone Age, about 2000 B.C. Copper was used at the later stage of the Stone Age, and then the alloy with tin, which is called “bronze.” At the time that the big stones of Stonehenge were set up (the smaller stones of the outer circle are more ancient) the Stone Age was coming to its end, and the Bronze Age coming in. [Illustration: FIG. 67.—A polished flint axe-head, of Neolithic Age, from Denmark.]