Man is an omnivorous animal: nothing comes amiss to him. When hunger impels he will eat the vilest refuse, but in times of prosperity bread, meat, and vegetables form the staple of his diet. 'Doctors differ' as to the original food of mankind. It varied probably, as now, according to climate, consisting of fruit and seeds where these grew spontaneously and in abundance, and of animal food where fruit, etc., could not be readily obtained; but with the dawn of civilisation man began to cultivate plants for food, and particularly the several grains still used for making bread. Of these, wheat, barley, and rye seem to have been the earliest cultivated, oats being later, whilst it is doubtful whether maize was known except on the American continent.

We are so accustomed to look upon bread as the 'staff of life,' the food above all others necessary for our sustenance, that the term, 'without bread,' has long been in our language synonymous with ' starvation.' Hence we find it hard to realise the fact that, if we restrict the term bread to that which is generally so called, that is food prepared from the farina or flour of various grains, not only individuals, but entire nations have lived, and continue to live to this day without bread; nay, that we may trace the history of mankind back to a time when bread was utterly unknown.

The early men who hunted the mammoth, the rhinoceros, and the bear through the forests which now lie beneath the waves of Torbay and Cromer, and sheltered themselves in Brixham caverns, Kent's Hole, and the Victoria and Welsh caves, knew nothing of bread; they may indeed, and probably did, as savages do now, eat such roots and fruits as came in their way, but it is abundantly evident that they did not cultivate the soil, nor prepare grain for food. They have left us their rude stone tools, and later the bone harpoons with which they caught their fish, the needles with which they sewed their skin garments, and the shell, bone, and stone ornaments in which they delighted, but they evidently lived like the hyenas, their contemporaries, upon flesh and marrow, and it is doubtful whether they even knew how to light a fire, or to cook in any way the game they fed upon. There is, at all events among the older relics, no trace of fire, no implements for grinding corn, and no calcined grains, such as are so abundant in those singularly interesting deposits of much later date, the Swiss Lake dwellings, where corn and fruits of different kinds, calcined and thus rendered indestructible, have been found beneath the mud of lakes where they have lain for at least two thousand years, so little injured by time that even the seeds of the raspberry can be identified. We can prove that these ancient lake-dwellers were advanced agriculturists, because we can distinguish among these remains cereals of various kinds, two or three sorts of wheats, one being that kind denominated Egyptian, two or three barleys, millets, and peas, also apples, pears, raspberries, blackberries, hazel nuts, and beech nuts, but no trace of any agricultural implement has been found, and we do not know how they turned over the soil, planted their seed, and gathered their harvest. Probably their chief agricultural implements were pointed sticks, such as are still used by many semi-civilised peoples, and they ground or crushed their corn by means of such mullers or hand-mills as are found so frequently among remains of the later Stone (Neolithic) age; certain it is that they made bread, or at least unleavened cakes of the imperfectly ground corn; they also stored the crushed corn in coarse earthenware pots, and ate it either roasted, boiled, or moistened, as it still is sometimes in Germany and Switzerland. Many of these relics are of a people wholly unacquainted with the use of metal, yet they knew how to weave linen, to make nets for fishing, and pottery similar to that often discovered in tumuli in Great Britain. It is not, however, till we come to the Bronze age that oats are found among the cereals in use, thus indicating progress, not only in the art of tool-making, but also in that of agriculture. Between the age of the earliest cave-dwellers and the earliest of the Swiss Lake dwellers archaeologists place the well-known 'kitchen-middens' of Denmark, upon which Sir Charles Lyell based so strong an argument in favour of the antiquity of man, but although these relics show a decided advancement upon those of the primitive cave-men here and elsewhere, no trace can be found in them of even the rudiments of agricultural knowledge. It may indeed be said by some, that difference of climate may account for this want of agricultural knowledge in the Danish savages, who have left their refuse heaps to show us what they ate and what were their occupations, and that whilst these kitchen-middens were accumulating in Denmark, and the stalagmite slowly sealing down the records of early man in Kent's Cavern and elsewhere, that in other more favoured spots men were tilling the soil, gathering in their harvests of wheat and barley, grinding their corn, and making their bread; and undoubtedly this may have been the case, because the beginning of agriculture cannot be traced, and the first glimpses we get of the art in the Swiss Lake dwellings show it already in an advanced stage; and since it seems certain that man did not originate either in England or Denmark, but made his way thither by slow degrees, at a period when the conformation of land and sea differed widely from that with which we are now so familiar; therefore during this slow advance of mankind from his primeval home to the utmost bounds of the universe, those remaining in the original cradle of the race would have had time to progress in civilisation, and to attain skill in those arts which can only be successfully practised in settled communities; nevertheless, the extreme antiquity of the art even in Britain, is testified by traces of furrows found beneath peat-bogs in Scotland where now corn will not grow, and may be seen in Cornwall also, among those heaps of metallic waste which are now looked upon as hopelessly barren; but who these early agriculturists were, and at what time they lived, is an unsolved problem.