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 CHAPTER II

attempting to pry into the early history of mankind during the dim vista of the prehistoric period we bid farewell to the ordinary methods of historical research. The handicraft products of bygone races, their fossil remains and relation to the deposits of Quaternary geology, are the evidential materials with which we have henceforth to deal. By a careful examination of such data, on strictly scientific lines, anthropologists have been able to penetrate the darkness which so long settled on the earlier phases of human civilisation, and already the trail of humanity is distinctly limned on the horizon of geological remoteness. The high antiquity now attributed to man, together with an analysis of the arguments on which it is founded, presents to the human mind a most fascinating field of research. In order to understand the special methods involved in such an inquiry a few preliminary and explanatory observations are necessary, by way of illustrating the relation between the works emanating from the hand of man and those culled from the collateral sciences of geology and palæontology.

Great Ice Age.

About the beginning of the Pliocene Age the climate of Europe, which was then subtropical in its southern portion, began to grow gradually colder until it attained an arctic severity, during which Scotland and nearly the whole of England north of the Thames and Bristol Channel became covered with a huge mantle of ice. The glaciers radiating from