LECTURE XII. 347 



some old authors to show that, in Belgium and Gaul, human 

 sacrifices and cannibalism continued down to the time of the 

 Romans. The short and imperfect description of the skull, 

 though insufficient to indicate the race, gives at least evidence 

 that it differed entirely from the contemporaneous race which 

 inhabited Denmark and North Germany. 



Whilst the discovery of Boucher de Perthes, which directed 

 attention to the antiquity of man, slowly made its way, 

 that of Dr. Keller, made at Meilen, near Zurich, in 1853 and 

 1854, burst upon the world hke a thunder-clap. The water 

 being very low, this circumstance was taken advantage of to 

 erect some walls for the recovery of a piece of land from the 

 dried up bottom of the lake. There was seen on the surface 

 a yellowish, grey mud, about one to two feet thick ; below 

 this, a bed of sandy clay, two to two and a half feet thick, in 

 which were imbedded the heads of piles and a number of 

 stone hatchets, clubs, hammers, and flint implements. In- 

 struments of bone, horn, and wood, rude vessels of unburnt 

 clay, a bead of amber, a bronze clasp, broken hazelnuts, fir 

 branches, and finally the roof of a human skull and several 

 skeletons, were found in this- bed, denominated by Keller "the 

 culture-bed." The piles stuck in the old lake bottom, which, 

 like the uppermost stratum, consisted of light coloured letten, 

 but contained no other articles. Keller soon perceived the 

 great importance of his discovery. He saw at once that he 

 had before his eyes a pre-historical building of a people igno- 

 rant of the use of metal, and, as regards civilisation, standing 

 in the same scale as the northern stone-people. No sooner 

 did this discovery become known, than similar discoveries 

 were made in Germany, Italy, and France, and we can say 

 that there exists in the plains of Switzerland, between the 

 Jura and the Alps, no lake or peat-bog which does not present 

 traces of such pile-buildings. The zeal with which these in- 

 vestigations were carried on, has brought many a singular 

 phenomenon to light, and whilst the reports of F. Keller, of 

 which the fifth has now appeared, are models of clearness, we 

 may characterise the huge volume of Troy on {Les Habitations 

 Lacustres) as a pious novel, resting, like the now favourite 



