THE FIRST TRACES OF MAN IN EUROPE. 15 



Zealand and Madagascar.' And there is going on before our eyes the 

 sad spectacle of the extinction ot some of the nobler savage races 

 of men, incapable of persistence in life in an age like ours, opposed by 

 the superior forces of European civilization. 



From the beginning civilization has spread from the East to the 

 West, and such is still its line of march, as illustrated by the Teutonic 

 race's steady pressure into the ever-receding "far West." So, too, 

 with the people of the pile-dwellings. They probably came from 

 Asia to Europe some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, being doubtless affect- 

 ed, as is every people, by the powerful modifying influences either 

 produced or put in full play by such long and vast migrations. And the 

 l^eople who made the stone axes and the pile-dwellings is probably the 

 same that reared the huge funeral piles known as dolmens."^ A dolmen 

 consists of two immense blocks of stone placed on end,^ upon which a 

 third is laid, forming a sort of table. The dead were buried beneath, 

 with various implements and weapons at hand. How a people, with- 

 out engineering skill and contrivances,- could rear such masses into 

 position, is a problem yet unsolved. They are found in Brittany, 

 Southern France, Great Britain, Portugal, North Africa, Nubia, Pales- 

 tine, and the East Indies, those of Brittany being the largest. 



Thus, instead of the golden age, that fancy represents as lying far 

 back in the race's childhood, we find the dull realities of a long Stone 

 age, during which man endured all and more than all the perils and 

 sufferings of the present. 



And yet, for each of us, as years steal over us, the days of our own 

 vanished youth are ever " the good old days." 



The Age of BRO^rzE. The predominance of bronze, as the mate- 

 rial of the articles found in the later pile-dwellings, has given to the 

 fourth prehistoric human epoch its name the Age of Bronze. While 

 some of these lake-villaofes continued in use from the Stone a^e, others 

 usually those farthest out in the lakes evidently originated in the 

 Age of Bronze. 



There is no longer room to doubt that the bronze articles of Switz- 

 erland were made near the places of their discovery, and were not 

 brought from the East, according to the common view. Some of the 

 very moulds in which they were formed have been discovered, and at 

 Nantes the remains of a foundery have been plainly made out. Whether 

 the bronzes of Northern Europe are of Phoenician origin is yet in doubt. 

 Their symbolisms and religious adaptations are in favor of that view. 



' To wit, the dodo, solitaire, nioa {Dinornis giganteus), and ^piornis maximus. (For 

 description, see Dana, pp. 578, 579.) Teans. 



* Or cromlechs. 



^ In some instances there are three or more uprights. The covering stone of one 

 specimen is 18 feet long by 9 broad. In the Anglesea cromlechs are stones weighing 30 

 tons each. Trans. 



