464 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



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 hkd 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 exten- 

 sive, 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 care- 

 fully examined by Steenstrup, Worsaae, and other Danish naturalists, fully con- 

 firmed 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 appli- 

 ances are concerned, they are almost as fully represented as would be those of 

 any existing savage nation by the researches of a painstaking traveler." 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 urus, 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 the 

 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 rein- 

 deer, the cave lion and hyena, the great bear and the gigantic Irish elk wandered 

 in our woods and valleys, and the hippopotamus floated in our rivers ; when 

 England and France were united, and the Thames and the Rhine had a common 

 estuary. This was long supposed to be before the advent of man. At length, 

 however, the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes in the valley of the Somme, sup- 

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

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

 Pengelly, Christy, Evans and many more, have proved that man formed a humble 

 part of this strange assembly. 



Nay, even at this early period there were at least two distinct races of men 

 in Europe ; one of them — as Boyd Dawkins has pointed out — closely resembling 

 the modern Esquimaux in form, in his weapons and implements, probably in his 

 clothing, as well as in so many of the animals with which he was associated. 



