When you can get to the British Museum, go into the room where the "British Antiquities" are kept, and there you will see for yourself the different flint and metal tools and weapons which I have described.

How many years passed between the shaping of the first flint and the moulding of the first bronze weapon is not known. We are sure that men used stone before they used bronze and iron, and that some tribes were in the Stone Age when other tribes had found out the value of metals. The three Ages overlap and run into each other "like the three chief colours of the rainbow."

For example, although some of the lakedwellings, about which I have told you, were built by men in the Stone Age, a very large number belong to the Bronze Age; and the relics which have been brought to light show how decided was the progress which man had made. The lake-dwellers had learned to cultivate wheat, to store up food for winter use, to weave garments of flax, and to tame the most useful animals, such as the horse, the

sheep, and the goat. Man had long before this found out what a valuable creature the dog is, for the lowest tribes who lived on the northern sea-coasts have left proof of this in the bones found among the shell-heaps.

In what is known as the Age of Iron very rapid progress was made; and while the variety of pottery, the casting of bronze coins, the discovery of glass, and a crowd of other new inventions show what great advance was made in the things man used, they show also how fast man himself was rising from a low state.

VIII. Man's great Age on the Earth.

At this point of the story you will, perhaps, be asking a question to which I will give the best answer that can at present be found.

You will ask how it is that we know these remains of early man to be so very, very old.

To make my reply as clear as possible, I will describe to you one of the many places in which the old bones and weapons have been found.

There is a large cavern at Brixham, on the south coast of Devonshire, which was discovered fourteen years ago through the falling in of a part of the roof. The floor is of stalagmite, or particles of lime, which have been brought down from the roof by the dropping of water, and become hardened into stone again. Stalagmite comes from a Greek word which means a drop. In this floor, which is about one foot in thickness, were found bones of the reindeer and cave-bear, while below it was a red loamy mass, fifteen feet thick in some parts, in which were buried flint flakes, or knives, and bones of the mammoth. Beneath this was a bed of gravel, more than twenty feet thick, in which flint flakes and some small bones were found. Altogether, more than thirty flints were found in the same cave with the bones of bears and woolly elephants; and as they are known to have been chipped by the hand of man, it is not hard to prove that he lived in this country when those creatures roamed over it.

But what proof have we, you ask, that the bones of these creatures are so very old?

Apart from the fact that for many centuries no living mammoth has been seen, we have the finding of its bones buried at a goodly depth; and as it is certain that no one would trouble to dig a grave to put them in, there must be some other cause for the mass of loam under which they are found.

There are several ways by which the various bones may have got into the cave. The creatures to which they belonged may have died on the hillside, and their bones have been washed into the cave; or they may have sought refuge, or, what in the case I am now describing seems most likely, lived therein; but, be this as it may, we have to account for the thirty-five feet of loam and gravel in which their remains are buried.

The agent that thus covered them from view for long, long years, is that active tool of nature which, before the day when no living thing was upon the earth, and ever since, has been cutting through rocks, opening the deep valleys, shaping the highest mountains, hollowing out the lowest caverns, and which is carrying

the soil from one place to another to form new lands where now the deep sea rolls. It is water which carried that deposit into Brixham cavern and covered over the bones, and which, since the day that mammoth and bear and reindeer lived in Devonshire, has scooped out the surrounding valleys 100 feet deeper. And ́although the time which water takes to deepen a channel, or eat out a cavern, depends upon the speed with which it flows, you may judge that the quickest stream works slowly to those who watch it, when I tell you that the river Thames, flowing at its present rate, takes eleven thousand seven hundred and forty years to scoop out its valley one foot lower! Men of science have therefore some reason for believing that the flint weapons were made by men who lived many thousands of years ago.

"A thousand years in Thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

Science, in thus teaching us the great age of the earth, also teaches us the Eternity of the Ageless God; and likewise those vast distances