At first Neolithic man is content with finer weapons. His stone axe is so finely shaped and polished that it sometimes looks like forged or moulded metal. He also drills a clean hole through it--possibly by means of a stick working in wet sand--and gives it a long wooden handle. He digs in the earth for finer flints, and in some of his ancient shafts (Grimes, Graves and Cissbury) we find picks of reindeer horn and hollowed blocks of chalk in which he probably burned fat for illumination underground. But in the later part of the Neolithic--to which much of this finer work also may belong--we find him building huts, rearing large stone monuments, having tame dogs and pigs and oxen, growing corn and barley, and weaving primitive fabrics. He lives in large and strong villages, round which we must imagine his primitive cornfields growing and his cattle grazing, and in which there must have been some political organisation under chiefs. When we wish to trace the beginning of these inventions we have the same difficulty that we experienced in tracing the first stages of new animal types. The beginning takes place in some restricted region, and our casual scratching of the crust of the earth or the soil may not touch it for ages, if it has survived at all. But for our literature and illustrations a future generation would be equally puzzled to know how we got the idea of the aeroplane or the electric light. In some cases we can make a good guess at the origin of Neolithic man's institutions. Let us take pottery. Palaeolithic man cooked his joint of horse or reindeer, and, no doubt, scorched it. Suppose that some Palaeolithic Soyer had conceived the idea of protecting the joint, and preserving its juices, by daubing it with a coat of clay. He would accidentally make a clay vessel. This is Mr. Clodd's ingenious theory of the origin of pottery. The development of agriculture is not very puzzling. The seed of corn would easily be discovered to have a food-value, and the discovery of the growth of the plant from the seed would not require a very high intelligence. Some ants, we may recall, have their fungus-beds. It would be added by many that the ant gives us another parallel in its keeping of droves of aphides, which it "milks." But it is now doubted if the ant deliberately cultivates the aphides with this aim. Early weaving might arise from the plaiting of grasses. If wild flax were used, it might be noticed that part of it remained strong when the rest decayed, and so the threads might be selected and woven.