PRE-CELTIC PERIODS. 283 



shell -mounds (the Kjokken-modding* of Denmark) and 

 cave-dwellings of Belgium and France, they seem to indi- 

 cate the presence of a pre-Celtic people, simpler in their 

 mode of life, less civilised, and only acquainted with the 

 use of implements in stone, wood, and "bone. Smaller in 

 stature than the Celt, round-headed, hunters and fishers, 

 these pre-Celtic races never seem to have cultivated the soil, 

 or to have settled down in fixed situations. "Western 

 Europe appears to have "been their home before the Celts 

 left the mountains of the East ; and five or six thousand 

 years ago may mark the date of their occupancy of the 

 regions where now are found their shell -mounds, cave- 

 dwellings, and kindred reliquiae. Still earlier than these 

 pre-Celts, Southern Europe to the shores of the Mediter- 

 ranean, and Western Europe to the limits of the British* 

 Islands, seem to have been occupied by a ruder but perhaps 

 kindred race the fashioners of flint implements, and the 

 contemporaries of the reindeer, the mammoth, and woolly 

 rhinoceros. Reindeer, hairy elephants, and woolly-haired 

 rhinoceroses, in the latitudes of France and England, bespeak 

 a severer climate than at present prevails, and under this 

 boreal climate these rude races seem to have earned a scanty 

 subsistence, by hunting and fishing along shore, by lake, 



* Literally " kitchen-middens ; " the name given by the Danes to cer- 

 tain mounds which occur along their sea-coasts, and which consist 

 chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle, periwinkle, and other 

 edible kinds of shell-fish. These mounds, which have also been found 

 on the shores of Moray and the north of Scotland, are from 3 to 10 feet 

 high, and from 100 to 1000 feet in their longest diameter. They greatly 

 resemble heaps of shells formed by the Red Indians along the eastern 

 shores of the United States, before these tribes were extirpated. The 

 " kitchen-middens " of Europe are ascribed by archseologists to an early 

 people unacquainted with the use of metal, as all the implements found 

 in them are of stone, horn, bone, or wood, with fragments of rude pot- 

 tery and traces of wood-fires. All the bones yet found are those of wild 

 animals, with the exception perhaps of the dog, which seems to have 

 been domesticated. 



