tually they lived in many other parts of the world as 

 well. Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, and the 

 British Isles contain many traces of them. Just why 

 they should have gone to the trouble of building their 

 houses beyond the shores of the lakes has never been 

 determined, but indications point to a race or period 

 of war-like activity, which made an isolated refuge one 

 of the prime factors of existence. 



The Swiss bodies of water are dotted with these 

 stations. The lake of Neufchatel has forty-nine of 

 them; Constance, thirty, and Geneva twenty-four. 

 Three different periods of Swiss lake dwellings have 

 been noted, characterized by their distance from the 

 shore. It would seem that whatever the motive that 

 impelled the building of these aquatic settlements, 

 it acted more powerfully as time went on, driving the 

 inhabitants farther and farther from the shore, until 

 new conditions changed their mode of life or they suc- 

 cumbed to the fate they tried so hard to escape. The 

 oldest of the settlements are located from a hundred and 

 thirty to three hundred feet from the shore, the latest 

 from seven hundred to a thousand feet. They were 

 built, naturally, on piles, which were about eleven or 

 twelve inches in diameter, pointed at the ends and 

 hardened by fire. When these piles had been driven 

 into the bottom of the lake a platform made of beams 

 and bound together by interlaced branches was laid 

 on them to bear the weight of the huts. The depth 

 of water under the huts is on the average about fifteen 

 feet and varies but little from that figure. The dwell- 

 ings themselves were made of interlaced branches, 



