Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 2.djvu/369

Rh 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 had 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 south-east 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 chalk-flint. This line of demarcation is not very much out of that which separates the bowlder-clay districts from those in which no bowlder-clay 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 subject, there seems to be still much doubt as to the uses for which some, and no inconsiderable number, of these objects were designed. For all useful 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