THE MUSEUM. 



267 



But how changed! In the place of 

 this once memory cherished lane, had 

 been accumulated miles of streets, 

 docks, railways, and warehouses, and 

 instead of the sweet notes of the feath- 

 ered tribes that were bound to meet 

 the ear, there was the din of busy in- 

 dustry at every hand; companions of 

 my boyhood had long departed either 

 this life or country — old land marks 

 and familiar spots had disappeared, 

 and to me the spot was strange and 

 desolate. 



If the work of man, in a few years, 

 can so change the feature of a locality, 

 as to render it scarcely recognizable 

 again as the same spot we enjoyed so 

 much in our boyhood, how little can 

 we, within the small space of human 

 existence realize the vast change in the 

 world's surface, what thousands, it 

 may be millions of years, may have 

 produced. From birth to death, one 

 continuous, incessant, and it may be 

 imperceptible change, is developing it- 

 self, only slightly recognizable, when 

 we are about to leave it at a ripe old 



"Nature does nothing at once by 

 bounds" — her shapeless operations are 

 ever going on incessantly and without 

 rest. Even in science, how vast have 

 been the changes during the last cen- 

 tury — the theories of Currier, Linna- 

 eus, and others of similar note are 

 now nearly obsolete; even Faraday, 

 whose far seeing mind :ould realize 

 the future when the chemist would dis- 

 cover that the sixty elementary sub- 

 stances then known to science would 

 resolve themselves into one, but whose 

 great mind failed to practically demon- 

 strate what some years ago was real- 

 ized by Mr. Lock3^er, before the Stu- 



dents of the French Academy of 

 France. 



Even the people whom Herodotus 

 described as "living in dwellings fitted 

 on piles which stand in the middle of 

 lakes, "the discoveries lately proceeding 

 in the Swiss lakes, thousands of years 

 after their time, seem to bridge over 

 the past with the present, and show by 

 contrast how vast have been the 

 changes since their day. 



During the years 1853-4 the waters 

 of the Swiss lakes sank to a lower level 

 than had been known for a great num- 

 ber of years. This was owing to the 

 severity and dryness of the winter pre- 

 venting the lakes from receiving their 

 usual supply from the snowfields and 

 glaciers of the surrounding mountains, 

 by reason of the diminution of their 

 streams. At Ober Meilen, on the 

 shore of Lake Zurich, the villagers 

 took advantage of this retreat of the 

 waters to add to their garden and vine- 

 yards by enclosing portions of the shore 

 ;with stone walls, and raising the sur- 

 face within the usual level of the lake 

 by mud dredged from its bottom. 

 During these operations a large num- 

 of wooden piles were exposed and 

 amongst them were found numbers of 

 tools and weapons formed of staghorn, 

 flint, and other materials. The dis- 

 cover}^ having been reported to the 

 x\ntiquarian Society of Zurich the cele- 

 brated Swiss Antiquary, Dr. Ferdinand 

 Keller, commenced an investigation. 

 The piles were made of oak, beech, 

 fir, and other trees, varying in thick- 

 ness from four to six inches, and were 

 very numerous. Some were entire 

 trunks, others were split in halves and 

 quarters, and were arranged in parallel 

 rows to the shore of the lake. Further 



