1. _Flint Arrow-head._ 2. _Stone Axe in handle._ 3. _Flint Knife._ 4. _Bone Harpoon._ 5. _Bone Needles._ 6. _Sceptre made of Horn._ 7. _Marrow Spoon._] Nothing shows us so well the immense time which must have passed since the men of the stone age lived as that these flint weapons and tools are found nearly all over the world, in Northern Europe, including our own country, in Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Palestine, Africa, Japan, America, &c.; and yet none of the present inhabitants of these countries have any history or tradition of the time when they were used. Metals are now used instead, and there is no record of the time when flint only was known. We are quite certain however that the stone age men lived at the same period as the great animals of the Tertiary age, the mammoth, the mastodon, the woolly rhinoceros, the Irish stag, the cave bear, and others you have read of in former chapters, because flint and stone weapons are found in the same beds of earth with these animals.[24] Suppose one of the present Indian or African elephants with his rider were to fall into a river and they were to sink to the bottom and be covered with mud, and suppose his rider had in his pocket some of our sovereigns. If that elephant should be accidentally dug up thousands of years to come, when most likely all elephants will have died off the earth, people would know for certain, from the date and figure of the Queen on the money, that elephants were used by the English in this reign, even if all our books and monuments had perished, and a new people inhabited the Earth. Something of the same kind has happened to prove to us that the stone-age men saw the mammoth alive. In one of their graves there is a slice of a mammoth’s great back tooth with a beautiful picture of the animal, with his bristly hair, scratched on the ivory, and there are also many of the flint and stone weapons which show that the skeleton in the grave was that of a primeval man. This little picture tells its tale more faithfully than any history. It is all the more certain to tell it truly because it was never _meant_ to tell one. When that man was buried with this sign that he was a mighty hunter of the mammoth, or an artist, no one could imagine that he would ever be dug up to show us, who come so long afterwards, that he saw the mammoth roaming through the forests of the far away past. There can be no doubt that it is a very good drawing of the mammoth with its long turned-up tusks, like those in the picture at the beginning of the book. In another place a picture of a fight between some reindeer scratched upon a piece of slate has been found. This was in a cave in France, and it, as well as the numbers of bones of these animals in the caves, shows that the reindeer, which now only inhabits the Arctic regions, must have been common then in France. You will see drawings of both these on page 135.