Fig. 4. ½

      Handles.

      Inquisitive antiquaries have raised the question whether any palaeolithic implements were furnished with handles. The Tasmanians simply grasped their tools in their hands;133 and there is little evidence that the Britons mounted theirs:134 but the triangular sharply-pointed flints which have been already described might sometimes have been used as arrow-points or javelin-heads.135 Some were doubtless missiles and nothing more.

      Uses of tools.

      But, as experts who have passed their leisure in recovering, comparing, and classifying these things confess, it is impossible to define the various purposes to which this or that stone tool was applied. ‘Who,’ says Lord Avebury,136 ‘could describe the exact use of a knife?’ We only know that with his rude implements the palaeolithic hunter did all the work that his hand found to do—felled trees, chopped wood to feed his fire, dug up esculent roots, scooped out canoes, killed and cut up the animals on which he subsisted, skinned them and dressed their hides to clothe himself withal, encountered his enemies in battle, and defended himself in conflict with the beasts against which his keen sight and hearing, his intellect, and these weapons, which it enabled Culture of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain. him to fashion, were his sole protection.137 Yet as we look at the tools in a museum, nearly the same at the end as the beginning of our immeasurably long Palaeolithic Age, we marvel even more at the mental stagnation of the primeval savage than at the skill which he had laboriously attained; and we wonder how it was that men who had learned to chip their blocks of flint so accurately remained content, generation after generation, with the art which they had acquired, and never thought of grinding the cutting edge against another stone and thus producing a better and sharper weapon. ‘We see in our own times,’ wrote Sir Charles Lyell,138 ‘that the rate of progress in the arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases; and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio.’ It would seem that in the Palaeolithic Age men had no pottery and grew no corn: they certainly had no cattle; and, though they lived by hunting, they had no dogs.139 Perhaps they sometimes dug pits to trap their game; for one of the engravings from La Madelaine may have been intended to depict a beast impaled upon a wooden stake.140 Their numbers must have been very small; for people who live by the chase alone require for their sustenance forests of vast extent.141 Some, as we have seen, lived in caves; others, as we may infer from the remains that have been picked up beneath the cliffs of Oldbury,142 by Sevenoaks, under projecting ledges of rock; generally perhaps, and especially in districts in which no caves were available, the dwellings were huts or shelters made of trees and boughs. Some of the bones that were found in Kent’s Cavern, some even of the gravels that have yielded eoliths,143 show traces of fire, which was probably produced by the friction of sticks or by striking flint against iron pyrites;144 and one is tempted to infer that the hunters or their women learned to make their food more palatable by cooking. The numberless fractured bones which were strewed in the caves had evidently been pounded for the sake of the marrow, which in every age was a dainty dish for prehistoric folk; and in the closing period, when harpoons had been invented, men were able to vary their diet of meat and herbs and wild fruit with divers kinds of fish. By that time too they had acquired the art of sewing, and doubtless they made themselves coats of skins, perhaps even, like the cave-dwellers of the Pyrenees, long gauntlets of fur;145 while fossils that have been found with natural holes artificially enlarged may justify the assumption that, like the cave-dwellers of France, they adorned themselves with necklaces.146 The figure of a horse engraved on a bone that was disinterred from one of the Creswell caves suggests, as we have seen, that in this country, as in France, there were men who were not destitute of the artistic faculty: but this solitary specimen can hardly compare with the best of the drawings that delighted the explorers of the contemporary French caves. It is difficult for any one who looks at these life-like sketches to believe that those who made them were not inspired by love of art; but the ingenuity of a modern archaeologist, who observes that the Australian aborigines scratch on rocks the likenesses of animals as charms to promote their fecundity, has suggested that they were merely talismans intended to supply the hunter with abundant game. As he insists147 that the animals which the artists represented were all edible, one may fairly ask whether they were accustomed to feed upon the glutton,148 the serpent, and the wolf;149 whether they counted each other as legitimate prey; what could have been the utilitarian motive for depicting an otter chasing a fish;150 and what was the object of engraving the strange quasi-human creature which the antiquary who discovered it in the cavern of Mas d’Azil described as an ‘anthropomorphic ape, nearer akin to man than the anthropoids that we know’.151 Nevertheless it is not improbable that religion, which has stimulated savage as well as mediaeval and modern art, may have been one of the motives of the cave-dwellers; and perhaps the artist was sometimes a magician, though it would be idle to speculate on the purpose of his spells.152

      Disciplined imagination, working upon a basis of ascertained fact, may help one to picture the lives of those primitive inhabitants of our island. We can see them returning at evening to the fires which their women had kindled, and which served at once to warm them, to cook their food, to keep off beasts of prey, and to scare away the malignant spirits of whom, if they were like other savages, they were yet more in dread. We may see a vast herd of reindeer crossing the ford at Windsor, and wolves watching for their chance to spring upon stragglers. We may hear the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the lion, the bellowing of the wild bull, the howl of the hyena, the snort of the hippopotamus, as it splashed or swam in the waters of the Thames or the Ouse. We may imagine the hunter striving by sign, or gesture, or rudimentary language, to express his delight when he has succeeded in the chase, his despair when ill success leaves him and his to pine with hunger, his terror when the eclipsed moon turning to red, when flood, or lightning, or pestilence warns him that the spirits of nature are wroth, his grief when bear, or bison, or famished wolf has slain his wife or child. How he disposed of his dead he has left no sign: but in the caves near Mentone, which were inhabited in successive periods of the Palaeolithic Age, there were evidences that the corpses had been decently interred;153 and the skeletons found in Moravia154 had been carefully protected by a rampart of stones.155

      Religion.

      Had the primitive people of Britain any religion, or any ideas that contained the germs of religious belief? It is not enough to point to modern savages like the Tasmanians, whose material culture was lower than that of the palaeolithic Britons, but who certainly believed in a spiritual world.156 The cave-dwellers of Mentone were interred with their implements and ornaments, perhaps intended for use in a future state;157 but such evidence is not forthcoming here. The painted pebbles, however, and the ‘bull-roarers’ which were treasured in the caves of South-Western France may well have had analogues among the inhabitants of this island158 who were in the same stage of culture; and doubtless, like the similar objects which are shown by the natives of Central Australia, they were connected, more or less closely, with religious ideas.159 No savage tribe, indeed, has yet been observed of whom it can be proved that they were without religion; for some travellers who have affirmed the contrary have been unable to comprehend ideas which differed wholly from their own; some have recorded facts which gave the lie to their own denial; some have confessed that after long intercourse they had discovered the existence of beliefs which they had never suspected; and all who have been qualified by tact and sympathy to deal with savages have recognized how hard it is to induce them to disclose their inmost thoughts.160 But much depends upon the sense in which the word Religion is to be understood. The great anthropologist whose writings have given the most powerful impetus to the study of primitive culture has taken as his ‘minimum definition of religion’ the belief in spiritual beings;161 and although it might be rash to affirm that materialism is inconsistent with religion, and no sympathetic