The assignment of the primitive relics of human art to a period when the use of metals was unknown, and man had to furnish his implements and weapons solely from such materials as wood, horn, bone, shell, stone, or flint, has naturally given a novel importance to this class of relics; and we owe to the pen of Dr. John Evans not only an exhaustive review of the ancient implements and weapons of Great Britain, but also, incidentally, of the world’s Stone Age, in nearly all countries and periods. In that work, accordingly, some of the earliest traces of man’s handiwork, as the manipulator and tool-maker, are described. Of those the implements of the River-drift Period are at once the rudest and most primitive in character. They occur in vast numbers among the rolled gravel of the ancient fresh water or river-drifts, of what has received from the included implements the name of the _Palæolithic Period_; and if they are correctly assumed to represent the sole appliances of the man of the Drift Period, they indicate a singularly rude stage. In reality, however, the large, rude almond and tongue-shaped implements of flint are nearly imperishable; while trimmed flakes, small daggers or arrow-heads, and other delicately fashioned flint implements,--as well as any made of more perishable materials, such as shell, wood, or bone,--must have been fractured in the violence to which the rolled gravels were subjected, or would perish by natural decay. But the same period is no less definitely illustrated by deposits sealed up through unnumbered centuries under the stalagmitic flooring of limestone caves, or in the deposits of river gravels and silt, filling in many of the caves with red earth and gravel embedding implements closely resembling those of the drift. The ossiferous deposits, moreover, found in some of the oldest caves of England, France, and Belgium, which have disclosed palæolithic tools, include also remains of the mammoth, cave-bear, fossil-horse, hyæna, reindeer, and other animals either wholly extinct, or such as prove by their character the enormous climatic changes referred to. In so far, therefore, as they afford any indication of the antiquity of man, they point to ages so remote that it is unnecessary to investigate the bearings of evidence suggestive of comparative degrees in time. Every new discovery does, indeed, add to our means of determining a relative prehistoric chronology which for some aspects of the inquiry is replete with interest and value. But the subject is referred to now solely in its bearing on the subordinate yet significant question relative to the manipulation of the primitive tool-maker.