In Palæolithic times when each family was self-contained, before social laws and customs had bound such units together to form tribes and clans, the hunters, for such they all were, followed their quarry through the forests and along the valleys, keeping to no set trackways. They needed none, for trackways imply thoroughfares to and from fixed sites or habitations—and the Palaeolithic hunter was a nomad.

When the amalgamation of families took place in early Neolithic or Epipalaeolithic times, no doubt the marsh-dwellers had recognized paths across the swamps to the mainland, and those who formed the shell-mounds of Ertebolle may have used beaten paths along the shore from estuary to estuary.

Many a wanderer through the country districts of New Zealand has found interest in the sight of the monumental earthworks which crown so many of our hills. There is something grand and yet pathetic about these old fortresses. Once the scene of turmoil and activity, they now lie neglected and still beneath the sky, clothed in bush, or scrub, or fern, or grass-grown and dotted with sheep. Their day is over, the Maori long since has ceased to swarm on their slopes and man their palisades; they are but a memory of the warring and the peacemaking, the fighting and the feasting of the eventful past.

In this paper it is my object to give a brief account of the general features of their construction and of their importance in Maori life.

The astronomical controversy about Stonehenge may perhaps be approached from an impartial view of one who is neither an archaeologist nor an astronomer, who offers no new or original observations, and proposes to examine facts rather than to discuss theories.

Sir Norman Lockyer was one of those who held that many Egyptian and Greek buildings were set so that they faced certain points on the horizon at which the sun or some bright star arose. But the buildings do not face these directions exactly, and the suggestion is that the discrepancies are due to a well recognized astronomical principle—that the points of rising and setting gradually move on the horizon; and the rate of motion being known, the date of the building may be ascertained.

While high civilizations were growing up in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Aegean, continental Europe was still recovering from an ice age. Though the glaciers had retreated, the high passes that led across the Alps from the favoured Mediterranean to the interior were still virtually closed by snow. The tundras and steppes where the men of the Old Stone Age had hunted the reindeer were now for the most part covered with a dense forest fostered by the damp climate then ruling. Through the belt of forest and mountain that fenced off northern and western Europe early man could not easily penetrate. To reach Britain or Denmark he must take ship and face the perils of the Atlantic in a dug-out canoe or some only slightly superior craft. But one moving road leads right into the heart of the continent. From the Black Sea to Bavaria the Danube opens out a passage way far safer than the stormy Atlantic. Moreover it leads into territories where the uncongenial primeval forest did not grow so densely nor so inhospitably as on the coasts or highlands.

Large tracts in Central Europe are covered with a deep deposit of fine wind-born dust that had formed during the dry ice ages. This aeolian soil termed “löss” is unfavourable to the growth of heavy timber, incidentally it provides ideal agricultural land.