234 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



We can imagine man in a savage state. " The penalty of Adam's 

 the seasons' difference" was full upon him ; at first he crept, like 

 the beasts, within groves and hollow trees, or into dark caves and holes 

 dug in the earth ; or else he perched himself, like the birds, in nests 

 built with less skill than those of the swallow or the stork. But neces- 

 sity is the mother of invention ; and the gradual sharpening of his 

 obtuse faculties soon taught man how to procure a better shelter. In 

 the dawn of social impulses, noting the fall of the rain and the sweep 

 of the wind, and feeling the necessity of providing for his own secu- 

 rity against the wild beasts ; next, deriving some rude ideas of stability 

 from the contemplation of the material world and of the structures in- 

 stinctively erected by animals, he turned his mind to the construction 

 of dwellings which might afford him real protection, and he availed 

 himself of the materials at hand the trees by which he was surround- 

 ed. The art of building, which has invariably been the starting-point 

 of civilization and the precursor of every species of knowledge, was 

 thus originated. The art of the carpenter is thus the earliest of arts ; 

 and the glorious monuments of later ages may, in their main outlines, 

 and even in many of their smaller parts, be traced to the rough wood 

 huts which arose in the wild forests and in the midst of lakes during 

 the prehistorical times. 



Like Cuvier, who, out of an age-eaten bone, was able to rebuild the 

 skeleton of a whole fish, paleontologists of our day have, from the 

 scanty remains found in the lakes of Europe, deduced almost to a cer- 

 tainty the characteristics of the lacustrine dwellings which formed the 

 abode of man during the neolithic period of the Stone age. The in- 

 terest awakened by such discoveries has been so great as to render it 

 wholly needless for us to give a description of the house, bridge, and 

 boat building of prehistoric man. The savages of the present age seem 

 to have been providentially left to confirm the truths which paleon- 

 tology has endeavored to wrench from the bowels of the earth and the 

 depths of the water ; they seem to be left as milestones to indicate 

 the road that mankind has passed over, or rather, as Edmond About 

 says, " They are the stragglers in the army of civilization, by the pres- 

 ence of whom we are informed whence the great body started and 

 whither it went." Reliable accounts of travelers bear witness, in fact, 

 to the existence, even at the present day, of certain Asiatic and Poly- 

 nesian islanders, who still inhabit wood dwellings erected on piles 

 driven into the water, thus perpetuating a custom prevailing in times 

 beyond record. Herodotus has a passage relating to a tribe that dwelt 

 five hundred and twenty years before the Christian era on Lake Pra- 

 sias, in Thrace, the modern Roumelia, whose modes of life illustrate 

 those of the lake-dwellers. According to this historian, the Pseonians 

 lived upon the lake in dwellings erected on platforms, which were sup- 

 ported by piles and connected with the land by narrow bridges. They 

 were polygamists, and a law directed that, for each wife, three piles 



