Oh. X.] DANISH SHELL MOUNDS. 109 



stances, the exact age of the remains of human workmanship is 

 uncertain, as in the estuary of the Clyde at Glasgow, where many 

 canoes have been exhumed, with other works of art, all assignable to 

 some part of the recent period. 



On the coast of Cornwall, at Pentuan, near St. Austell,- and at 

 Camera in the same county, at the depth of 53 feet, human skulls 

 have been met with beneath marine strata, in which the bones of 

 whales, and of several land quadrupeds, all of living species, were 

 embedded. 



Banish peat and shell mounds, or kitchen-middens. — Sometimes 

 we obtain evidence, without the aid of a change of level, of events 

 which took place in pre-historic times. The combined labors, for 

 example, of the antiquary, zoologist, and botanist have brought to 

 light many monuments of the early inhabitants buried in peat- 

 mosses in Denmark. Their geological age is determined by the fact 

 that, not only the contemporaneous freshwater and land shells, but 

 all the quadrupeds, found in the peat, agree specifically with those 

 now inhabiting the same districts, or which are known to have been 

 indigenous in Denmark within the memory of man. In the lower beds 

 of peat (a deposit vayring from 20 to 30 feet in thickness), weapons 

 of stone accompany trunks of the Scotch fir, Pinus sylvestris, while 

 in the higher portions of the same bogs, bronze implements are 

 associated with trunks and acorns of the common oak. It appears 

 that the pine has never been a native of Denmark in historical times, 

 and it seems to have given place to the oak about the time when 

 articles and instruments of bronze superseded those of stone. It also 

 appears that, at a still later period, the oak itself became scarce, and 

 W.as nearly supplanted by the beech, a tree which now flourishes 

 luxuriantly in Denmark. Again, at the still later epoch when the 

 beech tree abounded, tools of iron were introduced, and were gradually 

 substituted for those of bronze. 



On the coasts of the Danish islands in the Baltic, certain mounds, 

 called in those countries "Kjokken-modding," or "kitchen-middens," 

 occur, consisting chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle, 

 periwinkle, and other eatable kinds of mollusks. These mounds are 

 from 3 to 10 feet high, and from 100 to 1000 feet in their longest 

 diameter. They greatly resemble heaps of shells formed by the Red 

 Indians of Xorth America along the eastern shores of the United 

 States. In the old refuse-heaps, recently studied by the Danish anti- 

 quaries and naturalists with great skill and diligence, no implements 

 of metal have ever been detected. All the knives, hatchets, and other 

 tools, are of stone, horn, bone, or wood. With them are often inter- 

 mixed fragments of rude pottery, charcoal and cinders, and the bones 

 of quadrupeds on which the rude people fed. These bones belong to 

 wild species still living in Europe, though some of them, like the 

 beaver, have long been extirpated in Denmark. The only animal which 

 they seem to have domesticated was the dog. 



