were used for offerings when the village was desolated by the Plague. The Pin Hole Cave, in Cresswell Crags, derives its name from the habit of putting pins into a hole, and is to be looked upon as a survival of this superstition in the north of England, which has been traced as far south as the Pyrenees, and has left its mark in the holed-stones of India, The worship of ancestry is probably one of the oldest forms of worship, if not the oldest, in the world, and it still survives in Europe in the respect paid to elves, fairies, and "little-men."
General Conclusions.
From the facts mentioned in the last two chapters, it will be seen that the continuity between the Neolithic age and the present day has been unbroken. It is marked not merely by the physique of the present Europeans, by many of the domestic animals and cultivated seeds and fruits, and many of the arts, but by the testimony of language, and it is emphasised by the survival of the Neolithic faith in the shape of widely-spread superstitions. In every respect the Neolithic immigrant into Europe was immeasurably superior to the Palæolithic man of the caverns.
At the beginning of the Prehistoric period the small, dark, non-Aryan farmers and herdsmen passed into Europe from Central Asia, bringing with them the Neolithic civilisation, which took deep root. The section of them which spread over Gaul, Spain, and the British Isles, is only known to us as the Iberic aborigines. Outside these limits we meet with traces of the Iberic peoples in Sicily, Sardinia, and in Northern Africa. They have also left their mark in Asia Minor in the
