14 HEPORT — 1881. 



studied by Morlot, Troyon, Dcsor, Riitimeyer, Heer, and other Swiss 

 archiBologists. Along the shallow edges of the Swiss lakes there flourished, 

 once upon a time, many populous villages or towns, built on platforms 

 supported by piles, exactly as many Malayan villages are now. Under 

 these circumstances innumerable objects were one by one dropped into 

 the water ; sometimes whole villages were burnt, and their contents 

 submerged ; and thus we have been able to recover, from the waters of 

 oblivion in which they had rested for more than 2,000 years, not only the 

 arms and tools of this ancient people, the bones of their animals, their 

 pottery and ornaments, but the stuffs they wore, the grain they had 

 stored up for future use, even fruits and cakes of bread. 



But this bronze-using people were not the earliest occupants of 

 Europe. The contents of ancient tombs give evidence of a time when metal 

 was unknown. This also was confirmed by the evidence then unexpectedly 

 received from the Swiss lakes.* By the side of the bronze-age villages 

 were others, not less extensive, in which, while implements of stone 

 and bone were discovered literally by thousands, not a trace of metal was 

 met with. The shell-mounds or refuse-heaps accumulated by the ancient 

 fishermen along the shores of Denmark, and carefully examined by 

 Steenstrup, Worsaae, and other Danish naturalists, fally confirmed the 

 existence of a ' Stone Age.' 



We have still much to learn, I need hardly say, about this Stone-age 

 people, but it is surprising how much has been made out. Evans truly 

 observes, in his admirable work on ' Ancient Stone Implements,' ' that so 

 far as external appliances are concerned, they are almost as fully repre- 

 sented as would be those of any existing savage nation by the researches 

 of a painstaking traveller.' We have their axes, adzes, chisels, borers, 

 scrapers, and various other tools, and we know how they made and how 

 they used them ; we have their personal ornaments and implements of 

 war ; we have their cooking utensils ; we know what they ate and what 

 they wore ; lastly, we know their mode of sepulture and funeral customs. 

 They hunted the deer and horse, the bison and urns, the bear and the 

 wolf, but the reindeer had already retreated to the North. 



No bones of the reindeer, no fragment of any of the extinct mammalia, 

 have been found in any of the Swiss lake- villages or in any of the thousands 

 of tumuli which have been opened in our own country or in Central and 

 Southern Europe. Yet the contents of caves and of river-gravels afford 

 abundant evidence that there was a time when the mammoth and rhinoceros, 

 the musk-ox and reindeer, the cave lion and hyena, the great bear and the 

 gigantic Irish elk wandered in our woods and valleys, and the hippopo- 

 tamus floated in our rivers ; when England and France were united, and 

 the Thames and the Rhine had a common estuary. This was long sup- 

 posed to be before the advent of man. At length, however, the dis- 

 coveries of Boucher de Perthes in the valley of the Somme, supported as 

 they are by the researches of many continental naturalists, and in our 

 own country of MacEnery and Godwin-Austen, Prestwich and Lyell, 



