GENERAL VIEWS ON ARCHAEOLOGY. 341 



also regularly parallel to the latter, over a great extent in length and 

 width, there was found a second ancient stratum of six inches in 

 thickness, characterized as belonging to the age of bronze by the pres- 

 ence of a well preserved metallic object, 1 and by angular fragments 

 of the pottery of this epoch. Lastly, at nineteen feet in depth under 

 the present surface, the superficial vegetable mould attaining at this 

 point, owing to peculiar circumstances, a thickness of a foot and a 

 half, there has been laid bare over another rather extensive space and 

 still parallel to the general stratification of the deposit, a layer of 

 ancient mould of the age of stone six or seven inches in thickness, with 

 numerous angular fragments of very coarse pottery, and with abund- 

 ance of charcoal and broken bones of animals, of which many had 

 been gnawed by a carnivorous animal. Evidently man had lived on 

 tire spot, and during some time, for the charcoal was found in a still 

 lower gravelly stratum, at twenty feet under the present surface of 

 the ground. 



It will not be out of place to notice that the three layers referred to, 

 of tour feet, ten feet, and from nineteen to twenty feet in depth, rep- 

 resent so many ancient layers in situ. For, if they had been formed 

 and deposited by the torrent in the way in which they are found, the 

 fragments of pottery which the} r contain would have been rounded, 

 and not angular, and there would not be seen in them fragile shells 

 of snails, perfectly intact and well preserved. 2 



Now, deducting three centuries for what has been caused by modern 

 accumulations of soil, fixing the beginning of the Roman epoch in Switz- 

 erland at the commencement of the Christian era, a.nd its end at 563 

 after Christ, the date of the land-slip of Tauredunum, that laid waste 

 this vicinity, we come to admit that ten or fifteen centuries have been 

 required to bury the Roman layer under three feet (exactly 0.92 meter, 

 deducting 0.15 meter for the thickness of the Roman layer and 0.07 

 meter for the thickness of the sod) of torrential alluvium. We may 

 also admit, considering the uniformity and regularity in the internal 

 composition of the cone, that the latter had a tolerably constant ratio 

 of growth, at least when we take in, as we do here, a series of many 

 centuries. Only this growth must have gone on at a gradually dimin- 

 ishing rate, because the volume of a cone increases as the cube of its 

 radius. Taking this circumstance into consideration, and assuming 

 900 feet, say 270 meters, as the radius of the present cone, (which is 

 a minimum,) and four degrees as the inclination of its surface in the 

 locality alluded to, (from forty measurements based on the levels taken 

 by the railway engineers,) we' arrive at an estimate of from twenty- 

 nine to forty-two centuries of antiquity for the layer belonging to the 

 age of bronze, and at one of from forty-seven to seventy centuries of 

 antiquity for the layer that belongs to the age of stone. By the same 



1 Pincers — perhaps a depilatory — of molten bronze, of the style of the age of bronze, and 

 preserved in the collection of Mr. Troyon at Eclepens. 



2 The museum of Copenhagen and that of Lund possess each a relievo model in plaster, 

 representing the cone of the Tiniere with the excavation for the railway and the layers 

 alluded to. 



