Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/275

] and his passage from the condition of the farmer and herdsman to that of the merchant and manufacturer. Instead of the wanderer dependent on the chase, we have to deal with the dweller in fixed habitations, and with those social conditions which follow from men being massed together in various centres for the common good. We have to chronicle in the Prehistoric period the changes wrought in Europe by the invasion of new peoples, and the appearance of new civilisations—changes similar to those which are now rapidly causing the hunters of the bison in the far west to disappear before the advance of the English colonist.

The Prehistoric period covers all the events which took place between the Pleistocene age on the one hand and the beginning of history on the other. To it belong most of the alluvia and the peat-bogs, as well as the contents of certain caverns characterised by the presence of the wild mammalia now living in Europe, and of the wild or half-wild animals which had escaped from their servitude to man. One species only of all the mammals then alive, the Irish elk, has since become extinct. Man appears in the Neolithic stage of culture, or that of polished stone, along with the stocks of the more important of the domestic animals, and many of the cultivated seeds and. fruits. Subsequently in the long course of ages bronze became known, and then iron, each causing a great change in the arts and the social condition of the people. Polished stone, bronze, and iron, it must