454 NINETEENTH CENTURY. PT. HI. 



Again, in Switzerland, most curious discoveries have been 

 made, giving us proofs of three distinct periods in the life of 

 mankind. In the year 1853, when the Swiss lakes were 

 very low in consequence of a long drought, wooden piles 

 were observed to rise above the water; and when these were 

 examined by the Swiss antiquarians, it was found that they 

 were foundations of wooden villages, which had been built 

 by the inhabitants of Switzerland in past ages. They stood 

 some way out in the lake, and must have been joined to 

 the shore by wooden bridges which the villagers could lift 

 up when enemies came to attack them, and thus become 

 protected by the water surrounding them. Habitations of 

 this kind are built in the present day by the natives of Papua 

 or New Guinea. 



Down below the piles in the mud of the Swiss lakes a 

 great number of tools, cooking utensils, bones of animals, and 

 even burnt bread and corn, were found ; and the remarkable 

 thing was, that the different kinds of tools showed that the 

 villages did not all belong to one age. In a few, on the 

 lakes of Bienne and Neuchatel, iron tools were buried, show- 

 ing that when these villages were inhabited men knew how 

 to melt iron out of the rocks and make it into tools. These 

 villages must have been about the time of the Romans. 



In others, however, only bronze tools were found, and 

 these were much older, because bronze was used long before 

 iron was discovered. And lastly in some, tools of stone 

 only have been found, some beautifully polished, but others 

 rough and rude, showing that the men who used them must 

 have been mere savages like the Australians now ; and yet 

 the oldest of these lake-villages have no bones of extinct 

 animals in them, and therefore cannot be so ancient as those 

 men whose tools were found in the cavern at Torquay and 

 the sandpits of Abbeville, or as have since been found in 



