looks all across the fruitful Weald till far off he sees the long line of the North Downs running as it were parallel with these southern hills, and ennobled and broken by similar heights as that of Leith Hill.  Between, like an uneven river bed with its drifts and islands of soil, running from west to east, lies the Weald, opening at last as it were into the broad estuary of Romney Marsh, half lost in the sea.  And what we see to-day our neolithic forefathers saw too—­with a difference.  Doubtless the Downs then were as smooth and bare as they are now, but the Weald, we may be sure, was different, wilder and certainly fuller of woodland, though never perhaps the vast and impenetrable forest of trees of which we have been told.

I say that the Downs, now deserted save by the shepherd and his flock, were of old populous, and of this fact the evidence is plentiful.  There is indeed not one of the five main stretches of the Downs that does not bear witness to the immemorial presence of man.  To say nothing of the discoveries about Beachy Head, the earthworks there, and the neolithic implements and bronze weapons discovered about East Dean and Alfriston, we have in the Long Man of Wilmington, that gigantic figure cut out in the chalk of the hill-side, something comparable only with the Giant of Cerne Abbas in Dorset and the White Horses of Wiltshire.  That figure is some two hundred and forty feet in height and holds in each hand a stave or club two hundred and thirty feet long.  It would seem impossible to be certain either of its age or its purpose, but we may perhaps be sure that it lay there upon the Downs above Polegate before the landing of Caesar, and it may have been the foundation of one of those figures described by him as formed of osiers and filled with living men to be destroyed by fire as a sacrifice for our barbarian gods.

Nor is this all.  The whole range of the Downs as I say is scattered thick with the work of our pre-historic forefathers.  In Burlough Castle and Mount Caburn we have fortresses so old that it is impossible to name the age in which they were contrived and built, nor can we assert with any confidence who they were that first occupied the camp upon Ditchling Beacon, the highest point of the South Downs, or who first defended Wolstanbury.  And it is the same with those most famous places Cissbury Ring and Chanctonbury.  But the flint mines upon Cissbury give us some idea of the neolithic men, our forefathers, which should and does astonish us.  The Camp itself is less wonderful than the mines upon the western side of it.  Here we have not only numerous pits from ten to seventy feet in diameter and from five to seven feet deep, but really vast excavations leading to galleries which tap a belt or band of flints.  That these mines were worked by neolithic man it is impossible to doubt, but he may not have discovered or first used them.  They may be older than he, though all record even upon that marvellous hill-side,