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The pre-historians, for their part, must be content to make what traces they discover of early man fit in with this pre-established scheme, uncertain as it is.
Pre-historians have to reckon in geological time that is to say, not in years, but in ages of indefinite extent corresponding to marked changes in the condition of the earth's surface. It takes the plain man a long time to find out that it is no use asking the pre-historian, who is proudly displaying a skull or a stone implement, "Please, how many years ago exactly did its owner live?"
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.
After all, the Australians, or Tasmanians, or Bushmen, or Eskimo, of whom so much is beginning to be heard amongst pre-historians, are our contemporaries that is to say, have just as long an ancestry as ourselves; and in the course of the last 100,000 years or so our stock has seen so many changes, that their stocks may possibly have seen a few also.
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