336 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Oct. 



ancient kingdoms on the Tigris and Euphrates, through the same 

 rigorous study of language. Thus has our Rawlinson added 

 another page to the brilliant discoveries of Young and Champollion, 

 Lepsius and Rosellini. 



Nor, though obtained in a different way, must we forget the 

 new knowledge of a people nearer home, which the philosophic 

 mind of Keller has opened to us among his native mountains. 

 There, on the borders of the Alpine lakes, before the great Roman 

 general crossed the Rhone, lived a people older than the Helvetians ; 

 whose rude lives, passed in hunting and fishing, were nevertheless 

 marked by some of the many inventions which everywhere, even 

 in the most unfavorable situations, accompany the least civilised 

 of mankind. Implements of stone and pottery of the rudest 

 sort belong to the earliest of these peopl" ; while ornamented iron 

 weapons of war, and innumerable other fabrics in that metal, 

 appear about the later habitations, and correspond probably to the 

 period of the true Helvetii, who quitted their home and contended 

 with Caesar for richer settlements in Gaul. The people of whom 

 these are the traces on almost every lake in Switzerland are 

 recognised as well in the ancient lake-basins of Lombardy and 

 among the Tyrolean Alps, and farther on the north side of the 

 mountains ; and probably fresh discoveries may connect them with 

 the country of the Sarmatians and the Scythians. 



Thus at length is fairly opened, for archaeology and palaeon- 

 tology to read, a new chapter of the world's history, which begins 

 in the pleistocene periods of geology, and reaches to the prehistoric 

 ages of man. l>id our ancestors really contend, as the poets fan- 

 cied (Ji), with stones and clubs against the lion and the rhinoceros, 

 and thus expel < hem from their native haunts, or have they been 

 removed by change of climate or local physical conditions? "Was 

 the existence of the hyena and the elephant only possible in 

 Western Europe while a climate prevailed there such as now 

 belongs to Africa qr India? and was this period of high tempe- 

 rature reduced in a later time for the elk, reindeer, and musk ox, 

 which undoubtedly roamed over the hills of England and France ? 

 If we think so, what a vista of long duration stretches before us, 

 for no such changes of climate can be supposed to have occurred 

 except as the effect of great physical changes, requiring a lapse of 

 many thousands of years. And though we may think such changes 



(/i) Lucretius, v. 964—1283. 



