_(All these periods overlapped.)_ The Palaeolithic men had reached England when it was part of the continent of Europe, but after the lesser Glacial Period had driven the hairy savages southwards a slow earth movement produced what is now the English Channel and Britain was isolated. Gradually the cold relaxed and vegetation once more became luxuriant, great forests appeared and England was again joined to the continent. Possibly the more genial climate which began to prevail in this country and the northward movement of the reindeer brought the first Neolithic men into England, and it has been suggested that some of these earlier tribes whose implements have been discovered in White Park Bay, County Antrim and the MacArthur Cave, near Oban, form a link between the Palaeolithic and Neolithic people. The culture of the New Stone Age was a huge advance upon that of the earlier races, although it is more than probable that the higher development existed in different parts of the world simultaneously with the lower, the more primitive people becoming influenced by the more advanced. A wave of great progress came with the Iberians of Spain who spread across France and reached Britain by means of boats at a time when it was probably once more an island. Armed with bows and arrows and carefully finished stone axes and spears, clothed in skins and wearing ornaments of curious coloured stones or pieces of bone threaded on thin leathern cords, these Iberians or Neolithic men gradually spread all over the British Islands. They evidently liked the hills overlooking the fresh waters of Lake Pickering for their remains have been found there in considerable quantities. The hills on all sides of the Vale are studded with barrows from which great quantities of burial urns and skeletons have been exhumed, and wherever the land is under cultivation the plough exposes flint arrow and spear-heads and stone axes. Many of the numerous finds of this nature have disappeared in small private collections and out of the many barrows that have been explored only in a certain number of instances have any accurate records been taken. It is thus a somewhat difficult task to discover how much or how little of the plunder of the burial mounds belongs to the Neolithic and how much to the Bronze and later ages. The Neolithic people buried in long barrows which are by no means common in Yorkshire, but many of the round ones that have been thoroughly examined reveal no traces of metal, stone implements only being found in them.[1] In Mr. Thomas Bateman's book, entitled "Ten Years' Diggings," there are details of two long barrows, sixty-three circular ones, and many others that had been already disturbed, which were systematically opened by Mr. James Ruddock of Pickering. The fine collection of urns and other relics are, Mr. Bateman states, in his own possession, and are preserved at Lomberdale; but this was in 1861, and I have no knowledge of their subsequent fate.