CHAP. XIV.]
CONCLUSION.
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and the Neolithic, Bronze, and Prehistoric Iron ages in central and northern Europe.
We found Britain at the beginning of our enquiry part of a continent, without human inhabitants; we leave it at the end an island, with its inhabitants and its condition to be dealt with by the historian. Each of the changes recorded has left its mark in the Britain of to-day, and so intimate is the continuity running through all the events, that the Tertiary period must be extended so as to embrace our own time. History takes up the story of human progress at the point where it is dropped by geology, archæology, and ethnology, and carries it on to the present day.
