HIS GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS. 127 



dwellings, which give evidence of the use of iron and 

 bronze, back to others of the same class with which 

 stone implements alone are associated, and from these 

 still backward to shell-mounds (savage feasting relics), 

 cave-dwelUngs, lake-silts, and river-drifts, in which all 

 the implements are of stone and often of the rudest 

 description. The monoliths, barrows, and lake- 

 dwellings may carry us back three, four, or five 

 thousand years, but these shell-mounds,* cave-earths, 

 and river-drifts lie far beyond this — as far, or perhaps 

 further, than the former are removed from the present 

 day. In the older mounds, cave-earths, and drifts, no 

 finely-fashioned implement of stone, but merely the 

 trace of metal has been discovered, no polished or 



* These shell-monads — ^the EjoTcken-modding or Kitchen-middens 

 of the Danes — are found in abundance along the shores of Western 

 Europe, and consist chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, 

 cockle, periwinkle, and other edible kinds of shell-fish. They greatly 

 resemble heaps of shells formed by the Eed Indians along the eastern 

 shores of the United States before these tribes were extirpated. The 

 " Kitchen-middens " of Europe are ascribed by archaeologists to an 

 early people unacquainted with the use of metal, as all the imple- 

 ments found in them are of stone, horn, bone, or wood, with frag- 

 ments of rude pottery and traces of wood fires. All the bones yet 

 found are those of wild animals, with the exception perhaps of the 

 dog, which seems to have been domesticated. For full details of 

 these " sheU-mounds," as also of the prehistoric "lake-dwellings,'' 

 " earth-mounds," and " cave-dwellings," the reader may refer to 

 Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, as yet the most compendious English 

 work devoted to these archseologico-geological subjects. 



