The caves that have been examined in France and elsewhere have furnished for the Stone age axes, knives, lance and arrow points, scrapers, hammers.  The change from what may be termed the chipped to the polished stone period is very gradual.  It coincides with the domestication of the dog, an epoch in hunting-life.  It embraces thousands of centuries.  The appearance of arrow-heads indicates the invention of the bow, and the rise of man from a defensive to an offensive mode of life.  The introduction of barbed arrows shows how inventive talent was displaying itself; bone and horn tips, that the huntsman was including smaller animals, and perhaps birds, in his chase; bone whistles, his companionship with other huntsmen or with his dog.  The scraping-knives of flint indicate the use of skin for clothing, and rude bodkins and needles its manufacture.  Shells perforated for bracelets and necklaces prove how soon a taste for personal adornment was acquired; the implements necessary for the preparation of pigments suggest the painting of the body, and perhaps tattooing; and batons of rank bear witness to the beginning of a social organization.

With the utmost interest we look upon the first germs of art among these primitive men.  They have left its rude sketches on pieces of ivory and flakes of bone, and carvings, of the animals contemporary with them.  In these prehistoric delineations, sometimes not without spirit, we have mammoths, combats of reindeer.  One presents us with a man harpooning a fish, another a hunting-scene of naked men armed with the dart.  Man is the only animal who has the propensity of depicting external forms, and of availing himself of the use of fire.

Shell-mounds, consisting of bones and shells, some of which may be justly described as of vast extent, and of a date anterior to the Bronze age, and full of stone implements, bear in all their parts indications of the use of fire.  These are often adjacent to the existing coasts sometimes, however, they are far inland, in certain instances as far as fifty miles.  Their contents and position indicate for them a date posterior to that of the great extinct mammals, but prior to the domesticated.  Some of these, it is said, cannot be less than one hundred thousand years old.

The lake-dwellings in Switzerland—­huts built on piles or logs, wattled with boughs—­were, as may be inferred from the accompanying implements, begun in the Stone age, and continued into that of Bronze.  In the latter period the evidences become numerous of the adoption of an agricultural life.

It must not be supposed that the periods into which geologists have found it convenient to divide the progress of man in civilization are abrupt epochs, which hold good simultaneously for the whole human race.  Thus the wandering Indians of America are only at the present moment emerging from the Stone age.  They are still to be seen in many places armed with arrows, tipped with flakes of flint.  It is but as yesterday that some have obtained, from the white man, iron, fire-arms, and the horse.