That is a comparatively modern period, and yet I suppose we must
conclude with Dr. James Geikie that it isn't to be measured by mere
calculations of ten or twenty centuries, but of ten or twenty thousand
years. The perspective of the past is opening up rapidly before us; what
looked quite close yesterday is shown to-day to lie away off somewhere
in the dim distance. Like our paleolithic artists, we fail to get the
reindeer fairly behind the ox in the foreground, as we ought to do if we
saw the whole scene properly foreshortened.
On the table where I write there lie two paper-weights, preserving from
the fate of the sibylline leaves the sheets of foolscap to which this
essay is now being committed. One of them is a very rude flint hatchet,
produced by merely chipping off flakes from its side by dexterous blows,
and utterly unpolished or unground in any way. It belongs to the age of
the very old master (or possibly even to a slightly earlier epoch), and
it was sent me from Ightham, in Kent, by that indefatigable unearther of
prehistoric memorials, Mr. Benjamin Harrison. That flint, which now
serves me in the office of a paper-weight, is far ruder, simpler, and
more ineffective than any weapon or implement at present in use among
the lowest savages. Yet with it, I doubt not, some naked black fellow by
the banks of the Thames has hunted the mammoth among unbroken forest
two hundred thousand years ago and more; with it he has faced the angry
cave bear and the original and only genuine British lion (for everybody
knows that the existing mongrel heraldic beast is nothing better than a
bastard modification of the leopard of the Plantagenets).
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