How far such conditions may have acted upon the very earliest human inhabitants of Sussex--the palaeolithic savages of the drift--before the last Glacial epoch, it is impossible to say, because we know that many of them did not then exist, and that the present configuration of the county is largely due to subsequent agencies. Britain was then united to the continent by a broad belt of land, filling up the bed of the English Channel, and it possessed a climate wholly different from that of the present day; while the position of the drift and the river gravels shows that the sculpture of the surface was then in many respects unlike the existing distribution of hill and valley. We must confine ourselves, therefore, to the later or recent period (subsequent to the last glaciation of Britain), during which man has employed implements of polished stone, of bronze, and of iron. The Euskarian neolithic population of Britain--a dark white race, like the modern Basques--had settlements in Sussex, at least in the coast district between the Downs and the sea. Here they could obtain in abundance the flints for the manufacture of their polished stone hatchets; while on the alluvial lowlands of Selsea and Shoreham they could grow those cereals upon which they largely depended for their daily bread. Neolithic monuments, indeed, are common along the range of the South Downs, as they are also on the main mass of the chalk in Salisbury Plain; and at Cissbury Hill, near Worthing, we have remains of one of the largest neolithic camp refuges in Britain. The evidence of tumuli and weapons goes to show that the Euskarian people of Sussex occupied the coast belt and the combes of the Downs from the Chichester marshland to Pevensey, but that they did not spread at all into the Weald. In fact, it is most probable that at this early period Sussex was divided into several little tribes or chieftainships, each of which had its own clearing in the lowland cut laboriously out of the forest by the aid of its stone axes; while in the centre stood the compact village of wooden huts, surrounded by a stockade, and girt without by the small cultivated plots of the villagers. On the Downs above rose the camp or refuge of the tribe--an earthwork rudely constructed in accordance with the natural lines of the hills--to which the whole body of people, with their women, children, and cattle, retreated in case of hostile invasion from the villagers on either side. It is not likely that any foreigners from beyond the great forest belt of the Weald would ever come on the war-trail across that dangerous and trackless wilderness; and it is probable, therefore, that the camps or refuges were constructed as places of retreat for the tribes against their immediate neighbours, rather than against alien intruders from without. Hence we may reasonably conclude--as indeed is natural at such an early stage of civilisation--that the whole district was not yet consolidated