are closed to the explorer. Everywhere, however, where excavations
have been made, they have yielded the most remarkable results. M. de
Ujfalvy has brought diorite and serpentine hatchets and wedges from
the south of Siberia, and Count Ouvaroff tells us of a Quaternary
deposit, the only one known at present at Irkutsk, in Eastern Siberia,
containing cut flints. Near Tobolsk, Poliaskoff found some beautifully
worked stones. Other archaeologists tell us of having found, in the
east of the Ural Mountains and on the shores of the Joswa, hammers,
hatchets, pestles, nuclei the shape of polygonal prisms, and round
or long pieces of flint, all pierced with a central hole, which are
supposed to have been spindle whorls. Lastly, Klementz tells us that
the lofty valleys of the Yenesei and its tributaries were inhabited
in the most remote times by races who developed a special civilization.

At the other extremity of the great Asiatic continent, a deposit of
cinders found at the entrance of a cave near the Nahr el Kelb yielded
some flint knives or scrapers, and more recently a prehistoric station
has been made out at Hanoweh, a little village of Lebanon, east of
Tyre. The flints are of primitive shapes, not unlike the most ancient
forms found in France. They were discovered in a mass of DEBRIS of
all kinds, forming a very hard conglomerate. Some teeth, which had
belonged to animals of the bovidae, cervidae, and equidae groups, were
got out with considerable difficulty, but the bones in the conglomerate
were too touch broken up to be identified. Worked flints and arrow-
or spear-heads were also found in considerable quantities in various
parts of the table-land of Sinai, and at the openings of the caves
in which the ancient inhabitants took refuge. It was with stone tools
that these people worked the mines riddling the sides of the mountains,
and it is still easy to make out traces of their operations.