We English folk speak proudly of "hearth and home"; they are the centre of our social life, and the idea has come down to us through all these long, long ages. The hearth and the fire upon it was the centre of the life of these men, and the head of a family was also its priest. Some of the best known of these pit-dwellings are found near Brighthampton, in Oxfordshire; at Worlebury, near Weston-super-Mare; and along the Cotswolds, looking over the Severn valley; and at Hurstbourne, in Hampshire. At this last place "nine of these early habitations were discovered, some of which were roughly pitched with flint-stones, and had passages leading into the pit. A few flints irregularly placed, together with wood ashes, showed the position of the hearths, where cooking operations had been carried on. The sloping entrance passages are peculiar and almost unique in England, though several have been met with in France."[1] [1] _English Villages_, P. H. Ditchfield. [Illustration: IMPLEMENTS AND ORNAMENTS OF STONE, BRONZE, AND IRON AGES Older Stone Age: 1. Flint pick (Thames). 2. Bone pendant (Devon). 3. Scraper (Kent). Later Stone Age: 4. Deer antler pick (Norfolk). 5. Arrow-head (Yorkshire). 6. Flint and pyrites for striking fire (Yorkshire). 7. Celt in original haft (Solway Moss). 8. Bowl (Thames). Bronze Age: 9. Pin (Ireland). 10. Celt. 11. Drinking-cup (Berkshire). 12. Spear-head (Thames). 13. Pin (Thames). Early Iron Age: 14. Iron currency-bars. 15. Brooch (Dorset). 16. Hand comb for weaving (Hampshire).] In the course of time this race seems to have learned something in the way of cultivating the ground. The hill-tops, where they built their huts, were only suited for their cattle, and in order to find soil which they could till they had to go outside their earthwork, and some distance down the hill-slope. By their way of digging the ground, they gradually, in the course of many years, carved broad terraces, one below the other, on the hill-sides. There are some very marked traces of such terraces still to be seen near Hitchin and Luton.[2] [2] Also between Hitchin and Cambridge, at Clothall, in Herts, on the Chiltern Hills, on the steep side of the Sussex Downs, in Clun Forest, in Carmarthenshire, and in Wilts. But Pit-dwellings were not the only habitations. There were Lake-dwellings. One was found in the year 1892, near Glastonbury, where sixty circular mounds were noted, each the remains of a Lake-dwelling, in an area of three acres. There is another at Hedsor, in Buckinghamshire; and such Lake-dwellings, of much later periods, have been found in other parts of the world, and are met with yet in some parts of South America on the big rivers there; in the Island of Borneo, in the Caroline Islands, and on the Gold Coast of Africa.