ineffective one, which, through supplanting the former, obliterates its traces.

For comparison I have, purposely, somewhat neglected indications afforded by results obtained in England, Northern Europe, or Northern America, not that these indications are not valuable in themselves, but because the composition of the material used in the lithic industry of South Africa, and the resulting produce of the same, clearly assimilates it to that prevailing in Southern Europe, from the Pyrénées eastward and southwards.

This paper is not an attempt to try and solve problems of great consequence for that section of the science of Anthropology dealing with the stone implements, the artefacts of man who had ceased to be anthropomorphous ape. It is a recapitulation, it can hardly be called a narrative, of information obtained in South Africa, classified wrongly or rightly according to the tenets obtaining now.

It is the embodiment of some thirty years' research, and if the explanations can be challenged or criticised the numerous illustrations will doubtlessly escape that fate.

Renewed activity for the last ten years, in the search for these relics an activity resulting from the discovery of important deposits in which many and zealous collaborators have joined-has enabled us, at the South African Museum, to accumulate material from every part of South Africa, and of many from beyond. This material forms certainly the most complete collection of its kind. In addition, I was enabled by the courtesy of their owners to examine, photograph, and make casts of certain examples not represented in the Museum Collection.

I have been greatly aided by the members of the Staff of the Geological Survey of the Cape Colony in matters relating to the geological formations or sites of the implements found, many of them through their own exertions. I would fail in my duty if I did not make special mention of Mr. J. M. Bain, without whose intelligence, liberality, and absolutely gratuitous aid my attempt at discriminating in the intricate questions of the South African Lithic Ages would have been greatly impaired, and the results more incomplete. Many are those who also proffered help, advice, and suggestions. To name them all would necessitate many lines of print; but the omission of their respective names will not, I know, be by them taken amiss, for, indeed, unselfishly they toiled.

To Mr. A. R. Walker, of the South African Museum, I am much indebted for his assistance in photographing many of the numerous objects illustrating this paper.

THE PALEOLITHIC.

CHAPTER I.

SITUATION AND COMPOSITION OF THE PALEOLITHIC AND NEOLITHIC SOUTH AFRICAN IMPLEMENTS.

In 1866 the late Sir Langham Dale discovered close to his residence on the Cape Flats, near Cape Town, stones showing plain marks of artificial working. These examples were submitted to experts in England, who pronounced them to be undoubtedly man's handiwork.

To the present generation it seems almost incredible that doubt about the workmanship of these implements could have ever been entertained, because among them were the best finished examples of a Solutrian type ever found, and of which two more only have been met with since.

Willing searchers volunteered their services, and this discovery was followed by numerous ones in the Cape Colony, the Transkei, Griqualand West, where these artefacts were found embedded in mining claims "intermixed with precious stones in the diamonddiggings"; later on in Natal, the Transvaal, Southern and Northern Rhodesia, Swaziland, Bechuanaland, the Kalahari region, Mossamedes, &c., &c.

In fact, these relics of primitive civilisation, be they diggingstones or hand-picks, cleaving-stones or axes, flakes having served as knives, saws, burins, piercers, scrapers, or perforated disks for weight-making, orbicular stones for hand-throwing, or perhaps slinging, smoothed pounders, mullers, querns, or mortars, stones grooved by sharpening bone skewers or bodkins, or by reducing to shape the bone shaft of arrows, whether of huge size or ridiculously small, they all abound in South Africa from west to east, from south to north.

When they are of a type that might be assimilated perhaps to the

Aurignacian or Magdalenian, they are exposed on the surface, or occur in shell mounds or in rock-shelters. They are found, occasionally also with more ancient types, on the floor of huge sand-dunes by the sea-coast, when these are exposed and bared, to be no less periodically covered again, by the boisterous prevailing winds. They are common near the water-places called here "fonteins," i.e., springs, and mostly always near to, or in, depressions where rain-water accumulates in the season: the "vleis," or "" pans of South Africa.

When of a more ancient type, Chellean-Mousterian, they are bedded in alluvial deposits, often very deeply. They occur in numbers on the talus of mountains and high hills. They are met with, but then mostly singly, in the exposed banks of rivers; occasionally they are found on the surface, or where river terraces occur which, however, are not proved to be old. Often also they are found singly, where no trace of land erosion is perceptible or traceable, unless we go back to early pliocene-this showing plainly that their presence there is purely accidental.

The material is always a rock of hard texture; no implement made from a flint nodule has as yet been found, because the material does not exist in South Africa. The hardest stone occurring locally or at some distance off has been selected for the large and small implements. It is Table Mountain sandstone (more or less quartzitic), Karroo quartzite, dolerite, lydianite, or shale indurated by the intrusion of dolerite, surface quartzite of various textures, cherty sandstone, Dwyka chert, banded jasper, diabase, agate, and chalcedony, white quartz either sugary or transparent, even granite. Implements made of green bottle and white plate glass have also been found.

It happens not unfrequently that implements are met with in situations where the rock of which they are made is known to be absent. Barter may account for their presence there, but it is most likely that they were carried and left where found by owners of migratory or roaming habits or dispositions, clan-forming aborigines that have disappeared, leaving behind them, however, these artefacts as a testimony to their former existence.

It soon becomes plain, even after a superficial examination, that the making of implements of forms so various cannot have been simultaneous. The technique is too dissimilar, the general facies also. Next to the scraper-knife flaked off a hard stone for a passing want and probably discarded immediately after, we find a laurel leafshaped lance-head worked by careful secondary trimming on either side and of nearly pure Solutrian type; a "coup de poing" of a finish

equal to the best Acheulean. We have a cleaving-stone surpassing the best Mousterian; a rude, irregular stone with cutting edges fixed with a gum-cement to a wooden handle in the manner obtaining among the Australian aborigines; arrows, the cutting or piercing heads of which is obtained by minute chips set in a triangular piece of similar gum-cement, a few arrow-heads with tang, worked on both sides; and a ground axe of neolithic type are also recorded.

The evolution in the manufacture of these tools took probably a very long time in South Africa, as elsewhere. I have already expressed my belief, based on purely antiquarian grounds, and according to the tenets of the classification generally accepted, that we have in South Africa evidence of two periods: a paleolithic and a recent one, which I hesitated to term neolithic; but that there is no evidence as to the time when the former was replaced by the latter, and moreover, that this point will remain for long conjectural." In a word, a very ancient race had peopled Africa at the palæolithic stage. One or more races have supervened, possibly absorbed the former, and perhaps replaced it.

Unfortunately, neither geology nor palæontology has been able to give us, so far, a clue to the possible age of the South African finds. The question is still more complicated owing to material of a paleolithic type of the highest finish, as well as of ruder kind, having been found in valleys where old river terraces cannot be traced, as well as where river terraces exist, or are said to exist.

Then, alongside of these we have implements quite modern, as will be seen subsequently, and yet so primitive in appearance that one can excuse, yet not agree with, those antiquarians who, requiring a beginning to everything, have postulated that thorny subject an "eolithic" age preceding or accompanying the "Strepyan." Nor does the difference in composition of the material of which the implements are made help us to elucidate the point of antiquity. A hand-pick of dolerite will be weathered to a stage of unrecognition, while a quartzite one will, during the same time, merely acquire a patina, or polish; a chert or banded jasper tool will remain almost as fresh as when made, while a diabasic one will become deeply pitted or smoothed under similar conditions.

Eolian agencies have also to be taken into serious consideration, in a country where desiccation has been in progress, especially in the

* "The Stone Age in South Africa," in "Science in South Africa," Cape Town, 1905, a publication prepared for the visit of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The present paper is an enlargement of the necessarily highly condensed précis I then gave of our knowledge of the question.

north-western part, from probably the beginning of the quaternary period.

Great, almost unsurmountable, therefore are the difficulties fronting the Antiquarian in South Africa: first, because geology and paleontology fail him in affording precise indications of an old period from which deductions other than speculative might be drawn; secondly, because the Stone Age is not yet an age of the past, or if so, it ended yesterday; thirdly, because, with one exception, there is no evidence of a Polished or Ground Stone period having replaced the former and preceded a Bronze or Iron Age as in the Palearctic Region.

The only resource left to him is to turn to the comparative study of the implements themselves, but he is soon led to conclude, on lithological grounds, that these South African implements do not fit in with the classification that answers to the requirements of, and is founded upon, the evidence obtained in Europe.

The latter classification is based on stratigraphical and palæontological evidence, and it depends also on certain industries which unfortunately did not extend to South Africa.

Classifications are made to be unmade when new discoveries occur. But it is not possible to make the known South African finds fit in with the classifications of Mortillet or of other authors.

There is, moreover, a chain of evidence being slowly forged which points to a resemblance between implements from the Old and those of the New World. This similarity of form is so striking that it makes the Antiquarian pause when he considers the question of the possible identity of the races of mankind that manufactured these implements. Nor is he easy in his mind that this lithic industry is not the result of causes due to the growing intellectual power of man, affecting people in widely distant countries at the same or different times.

He has then to call the Anthropologist and the Ethnologist to his aid. In spite of the fact that a community of races is not implied by a like condition of culture, the Philologist may also be asked to add his quota, although his great error is, and has always been, to "treat a communicable character as an inborn gift."

Thus reduced merely to a lithological comparison, the study of the South African implements might appear to prove barren of results. But it is not so. The Chellean type is the Chellean type of the Palearctic and other regions. This is indubitable. But the types

The Magdalenian, connected with the reindeer, and perhaps late on with the stag, is a case in point.