to the conditions under which the implement-bearing drifts are found; for if the term petrological is to be understood as meaning rocks found in situ in the river-basins, and thus native to the soil, then it is not the fact that the constituents of the gravels in question belong to those basins; for we know that they are often largely made up-in one instance cited by Mr. Evans, to the extent of 50 per cent.-of the quartzose stones known as Lickey pebbles, and rounded fragments of jasper, quartz, and other foreign rocks. Such rocks certainly do not belong petrologically, in the proper sense of that term, to the riverbasins in which they occur, but to strata of a far earlier date. As Dr. Buckland has shown, the quartzite pebbles are derived from the New Red sandstone beds in Warwickshire and Leicestershire, and were at some remote period forced over the escarpment of the Oolite into the south and east of England. Whether they were brought in before or after the present river-valleys were formed is not very clear, nor perhaps very material. It is incontestable that they were transported from a great distance, and possibly by the same forces that brought the flint-gravels; and it is equally certain, in several instances, that their transport cannot be attributed to rivers now in action, because those rivers flow, as at Brandon, toward the quarter from which the stones were brought.

Nor, if it were certain that the intrusion of these rocks dated back to the Glacial epoch, as is usually supposed, or to some other very distant period, and had thus become denizens, if not natives of the soil, could the inference which is drawn from the absence of extraneous rocks be regarded as satisfactory.

The occurrence of alternate elevations and depressions of the land above or below the sea-level, during the post-glacial times, has been suggested by several English writers; and, if we suppose a district comprising the south of England and the north of France, corresponding, or nearly so, with that in which no bowlder-clay is found, to be sufficiently depressed, and then invaded by a deluge, the argument drawn from petrological conditions will cease to apply; for, no rocks are found in the drift-gravels, but such as belong to the supposed deluge-basin. A deluge of short duration would not necessarily introduce any foreign rocks into the submerged area, but would sweep into hollows and valleys those that came in its way; and, even should the submergence be of long continuance, as in some provinces of Holland, it would leave no more traces than those exhibited in our driftgravels. That such a partial deluge was both possible and probable is evident, when it is considered that a depression of 600 feet would perfectly well effect it; and, as we have evidence that the land has risen in several places 30 feet and more within the historical period, it is not difficult to believe that, in the infinitely longer time that probably intervened after the Glacial epoch, the same process of elevation may have been going on for many ages.

The absence of all traces of a marine fauna, and the occasional presence of land and fresh-water shells in these beds, are circumstances on which much stress is laid by the author; but, when fully considered, they hardly seem to warrant the inferences drawn from them. A marine fauna requires a marine flora for its sustenance, and, unless the submergence had been of long duration, this could not have existed. We find extensive marine deposits of older date, in which no marine organisms are ever seen; and, if marine fossils are wanting in drift-beds, those of the land and fresh water are usually equally wanting. We have, probably, hundreds of square miles of quaternary gravels, in which not a single specimen has ever been discovered. In those instances, comparatively rare, in which they occur in the implement-bearing beds, they are usually lying above the gravel, and may thus be ascribed to a later date; or, if of an earlier date in some instances, their occurrence would not of necessity exclude diluvial action, as regards the gravels.

There is one interesting topic connected with these drifts, which Mr. Evans has not dealt with at any length, as, indeed, it barely came within the design of his work; but he seems to share the general opinion that the men who made and used the drift-implements were contemporary with the hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros, and other animals, with whose remains they are often found associated. At present this is but a possibility, and it is an assumption founded on the fact of the bones and implements being often found in close proximity; but, if, as seems probable, the implements were formed from stones found in the gravels in which they now rest, it can hardly be doubted that the bones were already in that gravel, and may have lain there for centuries. From their shattered and way-worn condition, they have evidently been subjected to much rougher usage than that which some of the flint implements have met with. But, however this may have been, there can be no doubt, as Sir Charles Lyell has observed in the "Antiquity of Man," that "the fabrication of the implements must have preceded the reiterated degradation which resulted in the formation of the overlying beds;" a process for which vast periods must be allowed, and one which must have involved important geological changes. Among others we have very strong reasons to believe was the severance of our island from the Continent, an event, indeed, which, however brought about, could hardly have been unattended with important changes in the contour of the adjacent districts, and the courses of their rivers. When we contemplate the vast changes, geological, paleontological, and geographical, which our race seems to have survived, we are surprised to learn how very old we are, or, as Mr. Evans has better expressed it, the mind is almost lost in amazement at the vista of antiquity thus displayed.

It would seem, as might be expected, that, notwithstanding the cosmopolitan character of these objects-for, as Mr. Evans's researches

have shown, they are found in one form or other in every country on the face of the globe-certain forms are pretty well confined to certain localities, as if each of the tribes or families who used them bad its own manufacture. The half-polished and polished celts of Norfolk,

Suffolk, and Cambridgeshire, vastly outnumber those which have been observed in all other parts of England, from which it would seem that these countries were more populous, or the people more advanced in the arts, than in the rest of the island, or possibly they may have been the manufacturing district of the period. As regards, however, the distribution of the drift-implements, a far more suggestive and important circumstance is to be noticed. As Mr. Evans has observed, the district farthest north of the Thames, in the gravels of which flint implements are at the present time known to have been found, is the basin of the river Ouse and its tributaries. They have, in fact, been found, at one time or other, in every English county lying to the southeast of a line drawn from the Severn to the Great Ouse, corresponding thus far with the great escarpment of the oolite, but they have never been met beyond that line; and it is an interesting subject of speculation to what the dearth of these objects in the country lying to the northwest is to be attributed. If it was habitable and inhabited, it is difficult to imagine a reason for their absence, especially as in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire there is abundance of suitable chalkflint. This line of demarcation is not very much out of that which separates the bowlder-clay districts from those in which no bowlderclay is met with. May it not have been the case that, when the implements were fashioned, Scotland and the northwestern parts of England were still submerged beneath the glacial sea, and that on their emergence the southeast became in its turn depressed? Notwithstanding all that has been written on the seems to be still much doubt as to the uses for which inconsiderable number, of these objects were designed. purposes it would have sufficed that the cutting-edge of a celt should alone be polished and ground; yet it is often, indeed usually, found

VOL. II.-23

subject, there some, and no For all useful

that the entire surfaces of the faces and the sides exhibit a polish which could only have been obtained by long and apparently profitless labor. And not only so, but many of these are very fragile, being slightly made, and of delicate workmanship, and others are of such small dimensions that, as M. Boucher de Perthes pointed out, they never could have been available for any kind of hard work. Many of these exhibit no signs whatever of fracture or even of scratching, either at the butt or the edge-indications which could not possibly have been wanting, had they ever been used for weapons or tools. Besides which, while many of the districts, in which they are found, contain abundance of rocks suitable for all ordinary purposes, these implements are often made from Asiatic jade, jadeite, tremolite, serpentine, green porphyry, nephrite, and other stones of beautiful colors, and capable of taking a high polish, many of which must have been brought from great distances, and would have been very costly both to import and to work. The museums in Brittany, and particularly that at Vannes, are very rich in jadeite implements of this kind, but they are also found frequently both in England and Scotland.

But, if we conclude, as we must, with the author, that implements, for which such beautiful and intractable materials were selected, could hardly have been in common use, we may indulge in some speculation as to what were the uses they were designed to serve, notwithstanding that, as Mr. Evans says, we have not sufficient ground for arriving at any trustworthy conclusion. M. Boucher de Perthes thought that they were deposited by the survivors in the graves of deceased friends, as useful to them on their resurrection, and he argued from this their belief in a future state. It seems, however, hardly probable that objects, many of which obviously could not be serviceable, should be placed in tombs under the belief that they would be so at some future date. In the absence of any more satisfactory explanation, it may be suggested that these things were intended by our remote predecessors to represent the deities whom they worshipped, and that, by their varied sizes and shapes, they indicated the ranks and orders of their idols. We may believe that men, not having learned the art of representing the human or animal form, were obliged to content themselves

with symbols of their divinities-it may be their Mars and Ceresunder the form of weapons of war, or instruments of agriculture. Nor is this so unlikely as it might otherwise appear, when we know that these celts are still objects of worship in India. Mr. Evans, quoting from the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, says that they are there venerated as sacred, and it is known that, in a certain village in the Shewaroy hills, some hundreds of polished celts, of varying sizes, resembling those found in England and Scotland, are preserved in a temple, arranged in rows. They are guarded with the utmost jealousy by the priests, each representing some particular swamy or deity, and each receiving from time to time a dab of red or white paint, as a proof that the priest has performed before it the customary poojah or worship.

This being so, the discovery of these implements in Europe may have some bearing upon an important ethnological question. We have good reason to believe that the dolmen-builders came, in the first instance, from India, for we find in Wilts and Berks, and elsewhere, exact counterparts of some megalithic structures, and those of a peculiar construction, which yet remain in the same Shewaroy district in which the celt-worship is still practised. May we not, then, regard it as possible that the fabrication of polished instruments, as well as the practice of dolmen-building, originated in India, where they are still retained, and that these costly polished celts were brought hither by our Aryan ancestors, as the Israelites carried their Teraphim about with them, or as the Trojans, after the fall of their city, are represented in Virgil as carrying with them their household gods:

"Ilium in Italiam portans, victosque penates;"

and that the worship was only abandoned here as men became enlightened, or were subjected to the dominion of some race of a different theology? Since we find abundant traces of the Aryan language in our own, and of their sepulchral architecture in our dolmens, why should we not find in our fields and fens some of their idols? It is quite consistent with, and in a certain sense confirmatory of, such a belief, that, in almost every country in which these things are found, they are regarded by the common people with superstitious reverence, as if the practice of adoration had in the lapse of ages merged in a vague and faint tradition of sanctity.

Nor is it any objection to this hypothesis, but the reverse, that these implements are usually found in and about dolmens, as at Tumiac and Mont St. Michel, where nearly seventy highly-polished celts of imported materials-Asiatic jade and hard tremolite-were found ranged in regular order. It has been usual with almost all people, in all ages, that those things which they most esteemed in life should rest with them in their graves; and as we often find in our own country the priest's paten and chalice placed in his coffin, or the Anglo