RAU.) FEANCE— SWITZERLAND. 21 



SWITZERLAND. 



In this country erratic blocks bearing cup-cuttings are not rare. Accord- 

 ing to Professor Desor, about fifty were known some years ago, twenty of 

 them having been found in the French cantons of the repubhc; and owing 

 to the closer search on the part of geologists and archaeologists their num- 

 ber steadily increases by new discoveries. 



He figures on Plate I of his pamphlet the cup-stone observed as early as 

 1849 by Professor F. Troyon at the foot of the Jura, near Mont-la- Ville, in 

 the Canton of Vaud, and then and afterward described by him.* This block 

 consists of chlorite slate, is ten feet and a half long, and from four to five 

 feet in breadth. Its surface exhibits twenty-seven irregularly-distributed 

 cups, of which the largest measures nine inches in diameter and four inches 

 and a half in depth; the others are considerably smaller. Some of the cups 

 forming the central group are connected by undulating furrows of insignifi- 

 cant depth, and a short straight groove conjoins two cups near the upper 

 end of the rock. I give Professor Desor's illustration as Fig. 17. 



Dr. Ferdinand Keller has described the cup-stones of Switzerland in a 

 memoir which is not within my reach.f In J. E Lee's translation of Dr. 

 Keller's reports on the lake- dwellings of Switzerland I find the description 

 and representation of a block in the Luterholz near Bienne, in the Can- 

 ton of Berne, which shows twenty-one cups, arranged without apparent 

 order, and partly connected by grooves. The block weighs about twenty 

 hundred- weight, and consists of gneiss J Professor Desor refers (on page 

 14) to the discovery of similar blocks in the neighborhood of Bienne, with- 

 out describing them in detail ; he also alludes to several cup-stones in the 

 environs of Zurich. 



Cup-cuttings appear to occur in Switzerland mostly on boulders of 

 granite and gneiss, and, as a rule, unassociated with other sculptured figures. 



* Troyon : Habitations Lacustres des Temps Auciens et Modernes ; Lausanne, 1860, p. 158, note. 



t Die Zeiclien-oder Schalensteine der Schweiz, in : " Mittheilungen der Autiquarischen GeseUschaft 

 in Zurich," Bd. XVII. 



{Keller: The Lake-Dwellings of Switzerland and other Parts of Europe; translated by J. E. 

 Loc; London, 1878, Vol. I., p 460; Vol. II, Plate XXXIX, 14. In the description eighteen cups are men- 

 tioned; the Cgiue shows twenty-one. 



