till the ground, to reap, and to grind their grain; for in the ruins
of their villages are to be found grains of wheat and even fragments
of bread, or rather unleavend cakes. They wore coarse cloths of hemp
and sewed them into garments with needles of bone. They made pottery
but were very awkward in its manufacture. Their vases were poorly
burned, turned by hand, and adorned with but few lines. Like the
cave-men, they used knives and arrows of flint; but they made their
axes of a very hard stone which they had learned to polish. This is
why we call their epoch the Polished Stone Age. They are much later
than the cave-men, for they know neither the mammoth nor the
rhinoceros, but still are acquainted with the elk and the reindeer.[2]

=Megalithic Monuments.=--Megalith is the name given to a monument
formed of enormous blocks of rough stone. Sometimes the rock is bare,
sometimes covered with a mass of earth. The buried monument is called
a _Tumulus_ on account of its resemblance to a hill. When it is
opened, one finds within a chamber of rock, sometimes paved with
flag-stones. The monuments whose stone is above ground are of various
sorts. The _Dolmen_, or table of rock, is formed of a long stone laid
flat over other stones set in the ground. The _Cromlech_, or
stone-circle, consists of massive rocks arranged in a circle. The
_Menhir_ is a block of stone standing on its end. Frequently several
menhirs are ranged in line. At Carnac in Brittany four thousand
menhirs in eleven rows are still standing. Probably there were once
ten thousand of these in this locality. Megalithic monuments appear by
hundreds in western France, especially in Brittany; almost every hill
in England has them; the Orkney Islands alone contain more than two
thousand. Denmark and North Germany are studded with them; the people
of the country call the tumuli the tombs of the giants.