The men whose lives I am going to describe lived long before any of these writings were invented. They _spoke_ a language of course, though there is nothing left to show that they knew of any kind of writing, and they are called Pre-historic men because they lived before there were any histories either written by themselves or about them. But they could draw a little, as we know from the pictures of animals, birds, and fishes scratched upon pieces of slate, and bone, and stone found in their graves. Perhaps these pictures were memorials of their great or wise men, or showed that they were clever hunters, or fishermen. They knew the use of fire. Half burnt bones and wood and ashes are plentiful in the caves where they lived. They had none of the means we possess for kindling fire, and there are only two ways by which they could have got it. They might have rubbed two pieces of very dry wood together until the heat lighted them, as many savages do at the present time; or they might have struck sparks from flint upon rotten wood and blown the spark into a flame. We may be sure that when once a fire was lighted they would take care it did not go out, and if they wanted to travel they would carry with them a piece of smouldering wood to light the fire again. I do not suppose that these pre-historic men were any more civilized than the savages of Australia and other countries, and I have often thought when looking at these savages that they live in almost exactly the same way as the earliest inhabitants of Europe did. They have the same shaped weapons and tools made of stone, and these are fixed to the handles in the same way. They have the same kinds of needles and fish-hooks made of bone, and they sew skins together with threads made from the sinews of animals. Thus we see men living now in many parts of the world who are quite as uncivilized as the old inhabitants of Europe, who lived perhaps thousands of years before the Egyptians and Assyrians. These very ancient men knew nothing about metals. All their tools were made of flint, or bone, or stone, and they were of the rough shape you see in the pictures on the next page, and it is for this reason that this has been called the _Stone Age_. These were chipped out with great trouble and labour, and most of them were not even polished. With these they had to kill animals for food, to cut down trees, and fight against their enemies. The skeleton of a mastodon was found in the state of Missouri in America about thirty-five years ago with numbers of these flint arrow-heads underneath and near it. Perhaps it had been shot at with arrows, and when it died the flint points fell out of its decaying flesh. But it is not likely that these pre-historic men could have killed many such large animals, unless they caught them in pits covered over with branches of trees and earth, into which they might fall, as elephants are sometimes caught in Africa. [Illustration: X.