370 RECAPITULATION OF RESULTS. chap. xix. 



from the upper laj-ers of 2:)eat, for example, as compared to those 

 found in the lower ones. The great number also of the Swiss 

 lake-dwellings of the bronze age (those already discovered 

 amounting to about sevent}"), and the large pojiulation which 

 some of them were capable of containing, aiford indication 

 of a considerable lapse of time, as does the thickness of the 

 stratum of mud in which, in some of the lakes, the works 

 of art are entombed. The unequal antiquity, also, of the 

 settlements, is occasionally attested by the different degrees 

 of decay which the wooden stakes or piles have undergone, 

 some of them projecting more above the mud than others, 

 while all the piles of the antecedent age of stone have 

 rotted away quite down to the level of the mud, such part 

 of them only as was originally driven into the bed of the 

 lake having escaped decomposition.* 



Among the monuments of the stone j)eriod, which im- 

 mediately preceded that of bronze, the polished hatchets 

 called celts are abundant, and were in very general use in 

 Europe before metallic tools were introduced. We learn, 

 from the Danish peat and shell-mounds, and from the older 

 Swiss lake-settlements, that the first inhabitants were hunters, 

 who fed almost entirely on game, but their food in after- 

 ages consisted more and more of tamed animals, and, still 

 later, a more complete change to a pastoral state took place, 

 accompanied, as population increased, by the cultivation of 

 some cereals (p. 21). 



Both the shells and quadrupeds, belonging to the ages of 

 stone and bronze, consist exclusively of species now living 

 in Europe, the fauna being the same as that which flourished 

 in Gaul at the time when it Avas conquered by Julius Ctesar, 

 even the Bos p'imigenhis, the only animal of which the 

 wild tj'pe is lost, being still represented, according to Cuvier, 



* Troyon, Habitations lacustres. Lausanne, 1860. 



