neolithic stage of culture at the time of their discovery by Europeans.
Hence the weapons, the household utensils, the pottery, the
pile-dwellings, and so on, can be compared closely; and we have a fresh
instance of the way in which one branch of anthropology can aid another.

In pursuance of my plan, however, of merely pitching here and there
on an illustrative point, I shall conclude by an excursion to Brandon,
just on the Suffolk side of the border between that county and Norfolk.
Here we can stand, as it were, with one foot in neolithic times and
the other in the life of to-day. When Canon Greenwell, in 1870, explored
in this neighbourhood one of the neolithic flint-mines known as Grime's
Graves, he had to dig out the rubbish from a former funnel-shaped pit
some forty feet deep. Down at this level, it appeared, the neolithic
worker had found the layer of the best flint. This he quarried by means
of narrow galleries in all directions. For a pick he used a red-deer's
antler. In the British Museum is to be seen one of these with the miner's
thumb-mark stamped on a piece of clay sticking to the handle. His lamp
was a cup of chalk. His ladder was probably a series of rough steps
cut in the sides of the pit. As regards the use to which the material
was put, a neolithic workshop was found just to the south of Grime's
Graves. Here, scattered about on all sides, were the cores, the
hammer-stones that broke them up, and knives, scrapers, borers,
spear-heads and arrow-heads galore, in all stages of manufacture.

Well, now let us hie to Lingheath, not far off, and what do we find?
A family of the name of Dyer carry on to-day exactly the same old method
of mining. Their pits are of squarer shape than the neolithic ones,
but otherwise similar. Their one-pronged pick retains the shape of
the deer's antler. Their light is a candle stuck in a cup of chalk.
And the ladder is just a series of ledges or, as they call them, "toes"