The Britain revealed to our eyes when science first raises the curtain is not the Britain which we to-day know. The mountains were higher, and the chalk hills had not assumed their present smooth and rounded shape. It was not then an island, but part of a mighty continent, parts of which are now submerged beneath the waters of the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Atlantic. In all probability a great river flowed through what are now the Straits of Dover. The climate, however, apparently, did not differ to any marked degree from that which now prevails. Over this continent roamed many animals, some of which are entirely extinct, and others which have long since fled either to the colder north or to the warmer south. They included the mammoth, the cave lion, the bear, the rhinoceros, the hyena, the hippopotamus, the bison, the reindeer, the elk, and the wild horse. The men who lived with, and hunted, these beasts were very low in the scale of civilization. Indeed the only evidence of the possession by them of any {10} culture at all is a number of sketches or paintings of animals upon the walls of caves and on domestic utensils. The art displayed in these figures is extremely rudimentary, and between them and the pictures seen at a modern exhibition the gulf is a wide one; but the primitive artist undoubtedly possessed one sovereign merit--he left the beholder in no doubt as to the meaning of the picture! To these earliest inhabitants of Britain the name Men of the Old Stone Age has been given. Their sense of the artistic must have been far more highly developed than their sense of the comfortable. Their dwellings were caves, and those without any sort of furniture. Of manufactures they knew nothing: they neither wove cloth nor moulded clay. Their clothing must have consisted of the skins of the animals which they killed; and as the evidence seems to indicate that they were not cannibals, the same animals must have provided them with food. Since they knew nothing about the use of metals, all their hunting and all their fighting must have been carried on with weapons of stone; and indeed a plentiful stock of their arrow heads and axes has survived. To this period it is quite impossible to assign even an approximate {11} date: it may have been as late as ten thousand years ago, but it may just as easily have been a hundred thousand.