COMPARATIVE ARCHAOLOGY. 171 
of Dr Petrie, to be in the county of, Londonderry, and one 
in the county of Cavan, Ireland. <A few specimens have also 
been‘ notified in Brittany, Normandy, Saxony, Bohemia, 
Thuringian l’orest, and the Rhine district. 
WoopeEN TrRAps.—Of the smaller and more obscure relics 
of forgotten industries there is, perhaps, no more remarkable 
group than those curious wooden machines—the so-called 
‘* Otter or Beaver traps ’’—which I first brought under the 
notice of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland as early as 
1891. Subsequently I gave full particulars of all that was then 
known on the subject in Prehistoric Problems, chap. vi. 
Shortly after my attention was directed to these traps I 
collected notes of nine or ten of them, all of which had been 
dug out of peat-bogss at different times and in widely distant 
localities. Since then many more specimens have come to 
light throughout Western Europe. The conjectural functions 
assigned to them are fanciful to an unusual degree. Two or 
three found in North Germany were described as Otter-or 
Fish-Traps. A specimen turned up by a _ peat-cutter in 
North Wales was regarded by a high authority as a musical 
instrument. One from Ireland was held to be a fish-trap, a 
pump, a cheese press, and a machine for moulding peats. In 
Italy three newly discovered specimens were described as 
models of pre-historic boats. Carl Deschmann, Curator of 
Laibach Museum, labelled the two in his keeping as Biber- 
falle, because, in the lake-dwelling, near to which they were 
found, there was a profusion of beaver bones, but none of the 
otter. Other writers regarded these objects as traps for 
catching wild ducks. In Ireland, which has now yielded 11 
specimens, no remains of the beaver have been found in its 
post-glacial deposits, so that the beaver-trap theory cannot 
apply to the Irish machines. At the present time (1917) the 
recorded number of these traps amounts to 41, and their 
geographical distribution embraces Carniola, Lombardy, 
Germany (several localities), Denmark, Wales, and Ireland 
(three localities). 
These machines are so alike in their structural details 
that they must have been constructed on a_ uniform 
plan. Briefly, this consisted of a prepared block of 
