Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/514

498 kind are earlier required than coal. The mere savage needs nothing more from the mineral world than flint for his arrow-head and ochre for his personal adornment. A little later he requires bronze for his hatchet, gold and amber for his rude jewelry, clay for his hand-molded earthenware. A still more advanced race will learn to prize silver for coins, lapis lazuli for gems, brick-earth for Assyrian temples, granite for Egyptian colossi, marble for Hellenic sculpture, and iron for Roman swords. Only at a very late period of development will man begin to be largely affected by the neighborhood of zinc, lead, and mercury, of rock-salt, kaolin, and plumbago, of slate-quarries, marl-pits, and pipe clay beds. Last of all will come the economic employment of coal, which in our own island has caused the aggregation of densely massed populations around the great centers of Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield. Newcastle, and Birmingham.

How general is the relation in early stages of civilization we can see from the comparatively close similarity between the life and arts of all the lowest savages. How special it becomes in advanced societies we can see when we consider the cases of Bethesda growing up by the side of the Penrhyn slate-quarries; of Broseley, entirely engaged in the manufacture of clay tobacco-pipes; and of Northwich, Middlewich, and Nantwich supporting themselves by mining rock-salt.

Nevertheless, even at the earliest period, geological conditions must have largely influenced human life. Tribes which lived among rugged granite or limestone mountains must have been very differently circumstanced from those which ranged over level tertiary lowlands, or settled on the alluvial deltas of modern rivers. During that primitive epoch which Sir John Lubbock has christened the Palæolithic age, when man first dwelt in Britain, we see traces of such primeval differentiation. The naked or skin-clad savages, who then hid among the caves of southeastern England, were ignorant of all the metals, as well as of pottery, and only employed rudely chipped weapons of unground flint. The neighboring forests then contained the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, the urus and the musk-ox, while the hippopotamus still basked on the banks of the Ouse and the Thames. But man appears at that period to have been wholly confined to the southeastern corner of England, from the coast of Devonshire to that of Lincoln. This district roughly coincides with that in which he could obtain flints for the manufacture of his weapons; and it also comprises the most level portion of Britain, where he might find comparative security and well-stocked hunting-grounds among the low-lying jungles of the eastern counties, the Thames Valley, and the tertiary plains of Hampshire. He does not seem at this early age to have ventured among the wild primary hills of Cornwall, Wales, the Pennine chain, and the Scottish Highlands, but rather to have clung about the river fisheries and the flat shores of the southeast. Perhaps the bare and treeless chalk downs which run from Beer in Devonshire to the Norfolk