There has certainly been a time when men did not know enough to build dwellings for themselves--or, not to be unfair, had not the necessary tools--but lived in the forests which then very nearly covered the globe, using such natural shelter as they found ready for them, almost like the savage animals which it was their main business to fight and kill in self-defence and also for food and clothing. Caverns in steep mountain-sides must have been their most luxurious, because safest and best-protected, retreats. Many dozens of such caverns are known in all parts of the world, and the tale they tell is not difficult to read. Several have become very famous, from the wealth of finds with which they rewarded the searchers. Some appear to have been used as burying-places, for the ground in them is covered to a great depth with broken-up human skulls and skeletons, while outside, on the rocky ledges or platforms before the mouth of the cavern, are found the traces of large fires, built again and again on the same spot--ashes, and cinders, and charred bones of animals; also broken marrow-bones, horns, hoofs, and other remains of plentiful meals, showing that then already it was the custom to feast at funerals. Other caverns have as certainly been used as dwellings. Hence the name of "cave-dwellers," which has been given to those otherwise unknown races. How very crude and primitive their mode of life is shown by the vast quantities of tools and weapons in hard flint--generally broken--which are found intermixed with the other remains. They are very simple: heads of spears, blades of knives and scrapers, some indented like coarse saws, hatchets and mallets chipped into shape with no attempt at polishing--such, with occasional variations in bone, was the sum total of the cave-dwellers' equipment for the chase, for war, and for domestic purposes. That they could, with such slender resources, hold their own against the animals whose haunts they shared and who then were so much more numerous than men, is the more wonderful that those animals were of monstrous size, more than twice the size of the same kinds now, not to speak of some huge beasts which then roamed woods and plains in herds and are now wholly extinct--such as the mammoth, the ancestor of our elephant. In all those heaps of tools and fragments, not a trace of any metal has been found; wherefore this oldest of all times of which we can catch stray glimpses has been given the general name of "Age of Stone." * * * * * _To Any Subscriber Securing_ For Us =1= _NEW_ _SUBSCRIPTION_ _We Will Send, Post-Paid, A BOUND VOLUME OF ..._ =THE GREAT ROUND WORLD= _These volumes are neatly bound in cloth, with title stamped on side and back, and make a neat library book, handy in size and weight, and tasteful in appearance._