The stone-age, with its three great divisions, the eolithic (_eos_, Greek for dawn, and _lithos_, stone) the palaeolithic (_pallaeos_, old), and the neolithic (_neos_, new), and their numerous subdivisions, comes first; then the age of copper and bronze; and then the early iron-age, which is about the limit of proto-history.

Here I shall confine my remarks to Europe.

I am not going far afield into such questions as: Who were the mound-builders of North America?
And are the Calaveras skull and other remains found in the gold-bearing gravels of California to be reckoned amongst the earliest traces of man in the globe?
Nor, again, must I pause to speculate whether the dark-stained lustrous flint implements discovered by Mr.Henry Balfour at a high level below the Victoria Falls, and possibly deposited there by the river Zambezi before it had carved the present gorge in the solid basalt, prove that likewise in South Africa man was alive and busy untold thousands of years ago.

Also, I shall here confine myself to the stone-age, because my object is chiefly to illustrate the long pedigree of the species from which we are all sprung.
The antiquity of man being my immediate theme, I can hardly avoid saying something about eoliths; though the subject is one that invariably sets pre-historians at each other's throats.

There are eoliths and eoliths, however; and some of M.Rutot's Belgian examples are now-a-days almost reckoned respectable.