EXPLANATORY AND INTRODUCTORY. V 



feet long, and five to six feet high, which is roofed 

 over with flat slabs of gneiss. In the centre of the 

 long side, fronting the south, is a door leading out- 

 ward through a gallery, also of stone, sixteen to 

 twenty feet long, three feet high, and two to three 

 feet broad. Around the sides of the chamber are 

 stalls or niches, separated by partitions of wood or 

 stone, and in these are the skeletons of the old people, 

 seated with their legs bent under their bodies, or with 

 the bones fallen together in a heap and the skull on 

 top, and beside them their stone weapons and orna- 

 ments of shell and amber. The whole structure is 

 buried under a mound or tumulus of earth. This, 

 again, is the style of the family sepulchres of the 

 modern Esquimaux, and is apparently borrowed from 

 the plan of their ordinary dwellings, as the existing 

 plan of a Lapland house is thought to represent that 

 of the ancient gallery graves of Sweden. These in- 

 stances represent the absolute Stone period of Europe 

 before the use of bronze; but they belong to what has 

 been called the Neolithic or later Stone period, in 

 which stone implements of the most perfect kind 

 existed, and in which the physical features and 

 animal inhabitants of Europe were the same as at 

 present. 



In an earlier part of the Stone Age, animals now 

 locally or wholly extinct still survived, and there 

 were climatal and geographical conditions somewhat 

 different from those of the present time. In France 

 and Belgium, for example, there are indications that 



