SWISS LAKE-DWELLINGS. 351 



1 Dans la pr^cedente session du Congres, M. Steenstrup a 6mis l'id^e, 

 apres avoir examine les collections recueillies dans les cavernes beiges, 

 que nos principales especes domestiques pourraient a la rigueur etre 

 originaires du sol qu'elles habitent et y avoir ete directement assujeties 

 par l'liomme. Cette solution est loin d'etre improbable. Elle a ceci de 

 frappant de se trouver en accord avec les principes qui tendent a s'etablir 

 dans l'anthropologie, et d'apres lesquels les conquetes violentes et les 

 deplacements des peuples auraient joue dans la constitution de nos 

 populations un role fundamental moins important que celui qu'on avait 

 ete d'abord porte a leur attribuer ; la grande masse des habitants d'un 

 pays etant composee par les tres anciens occupants du sol et non par les 

 envahisseurs. Ces principes ont ete surtout soutenus avec conviction par 

 MM. de Quatrefages et Yirchow durant ces dernieres annees pour les 

 peuples Europeens. La meme these a 6te* defendue recemment a. l'aide 

 d'une grande Erudition et d'une argumentation persuasive, pour les 

 langues occidentales 1 . Je crois, pouvoir prouver de nous cote que notre 

 age de la pierre 2 polie n'est pas le resultat d'une importation, mais qu'ila 

 pris naissance dans nos regions memes.' 



Professor Steenstrup is reported as having expressed himself entirely 

 to the opposite effect in the ' Compte Rendu ' (p. 1 63) of the Inter- 

 national Congress held at Copenhagen in 1869 ; and unless he changed 

 his opinion in the interval between 1869 and 1873, it must be through 

 some error that his name is quoted as in the above extract from the 

 Stockholm ' Compte Rendu.' There is no room however for suggesting 

 that the reference to M. Granier de Cassagnac's work is made through 

 inadvertence ; and I must remark therefore that no conclusion however 

 much in want of support can gain much by a reference to that produc- 

 tion. On the other hand, the respectable authority of Dr. H. Christ (in 

 Rutimeyer's 'Fauna der Pfahlbauten,' pp. 225-226) can be brought for- 

 ward for ' die Autochthonie ' theory. 



I cannot understand how any one with the evidence properly before 

 him can doubt that the goat, sheep, horse, and dog were in the earliest 

 neolithic times imported as domesticated animals into this country 

 and into Switzerland. The ease with which the calf of a pit-fall- 

 taken Bos jyrimigenius would be domesticated, as well as some other 

 reasons, may make it just possible that the domestic cow of those times 

 may not in all cases have been imported already tamed. But I incline 

 to think that this really was most commonly the case. 



On the other hand, having been convinced by what I saw in the Swiss 



1 Granier de Cassagnac, 'Les origines de la langue Francaise.' Paris, 1873. 

 8 'Compte rendu du Congres de 1872,' p. 459. 



