Primitive Man. 59 



of the dolmen and crannoge builders of Europe and Asia, 

 and of the mound builders of America. Some species of 

 dolmens may be older, others more recent, than the begin- 

 ning of the new stone age. It is certain that the upper 

 sections of the peat beds have yielded bronze implements, 

 notably a bronze shield of skilled workmanship, which 

 brings this deposit certainly below the neolithic era. These 

 peat beds, or peat mosses, as they are called, are most 

 abundant, and have been studied to the best advantage in 

 Denmark. They consist of successive layers of carbonized 

 material, formed from trees known to be of different 

 periods, the lowest composed of aquatic plants and pines, 

 including the Scotch fir, which long since disappeared from 

 the country. This gives place to various species of oak, 

 all but one of which has disappeared and these, in their 

 turn, to the beech, which now grows luxuriantly in the 

 country. The depth is from fifteen to twenty feet. Palaeo- 

 lithic objects are found in the lowest deposit, which must, 

 according to Professor Steenstrup, have been formed from 

 ten to twelve thousand years since. Peat mosses and bogs, 

 with corresponding remains, and imbedding the remains of 

 extinct species of animals of the same age, are found in 

 Ireland, Prance and Switzerland in the latter containing 

 the well-known leaf-marked coal, which, being covered by 

 a glacial deposit, is of great antiquity, contemporaneous, in 

 the opinion of some, with the earliest appearance of man 

 in pre-glacial times. While it is true that, owing to the 

 spongy, yielding nature of the material of the peat beds, 

 we are not so well assured as to the antiquity of remains 

 therein imbedded as in the case of the well-marked geolog- 

 ical stratum of the diluvium, yet the researches thus far 

 undertaken have been so carefully and impartially con- 

 ducted as to make their results as worthy of confidence as 

 similar explorations of the diluvium ; and, as Professor 

 Virchow has remarked, " If doubt was still entertained as 

 to the coincidence of the age of the pines (now, as we have 

 said, extinct) and the age of stone, the discovery of a flint 

 instrument in the peat at the foot of such a pine would be 

 conclusive." 



Coming next to the shell mounds or kitchen middens, 

 these also abound most plentifully along the coast of Scan- 

 dinavia, Denmark and Xorth Germany. They consist of 

 remains of prehistoric cookery, oyster-shells, mussels, lim- 



