A HALF-CENTURY OF SCIENCE. 75 



implements, and though it seemed a priori improbable that a com- 

 pound of copper and tin should have preceded the simple metal iron, 

 nevertheless, the researches of archaeologists have shown that there 

 really was in Europe a " bronze age," which at the dawn of history- 

 was just giving way to that of " iron." The contents of ancient 

 graves, buried in many cases so that their owner might carry some at 

 least of his wealth with him to the world of spirits, left no room for 

 doubt as to the existence of a bronze age ; but we get a completer 

 idea of the condition of man at this period from the Swiss lake-vil- 

 lages, first made known to us by Keller. Along the shallow edges of 

 the Swiss lakes there flourished, once upon a time, many populous vil- 

 lages or towns, built on platforms supported by piles, exactly as many 

 Malayan villages are now. Under these circumstances innumerable 

 objects were one by one dropped into the water ; sometimes whole 

 villages were buraed, and their contents submerged ; and thus we have 

 been able to recover, from the waters of oblivion in which they had 

 rested for more than two thousand years, not only the arms and tools 

 of this ancient people, the bones of their animals, their pottery and 

 ornaments, but the stuffs they wore, the grain they had stored up for 

 future use, even fruits and cakes of bread. 



But this bronze-using people were not the earliest occupants of 

 Europe. The contents of ancient tombs give evidence of a time when 

 metal was unknown. This also was confirmed by the evidence then 

 unexpectedly received from the Swiss lakes. By the side of the 

 bronze-age villages were others, not less extensive, in which, while im- 

 plements of stone and bone were discovered literally by thousands, not 

 a trace of metal was met with. The shell-mounds, or refuse-heaps, 

 accumulated by the ancient fishermen along the shores of Denmark, 

 fully confirmed the existence of a " stone age." 



~No bones of the reindeer, no fragment of any of the extinct mam- 

 malia, have been found in any of the Swiss lake-villages or in any of 

 the thousands of tumuli which have been opened in our own country, 

 or in Central and Southern Europe. Yet the contents of caves and of 

 river- gravels afford abundant evidence that there was a time when the 

 mammoth and rhinoceros, the musk-ox and reindeer, the cave-lion and 

 hyena, the great bear and the gigantic Irish elk wandered in our 

 woods and valleys, and the hippopotamus floated in our rivers ; when 

 England and France were united, and the Thames and the Rhine had 

 a common estuary. This was long supposed to be before the advent 

 of man. At length, however, the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes 

 in the valley of the Somme, supported as they are by the researches 

 of many Continental naturalists, and in our own country of MacEnery 

 and Godwin - Austen, Prestwich and Lyell, Vivian and Pengelly, 

 Christy, Evans, and many more, have proved that man formed a hum- 

 ble part of this strange assembly. Nay, even at this early period there 

 were at least two distinct races of men in Europe ; one of them as 



