322 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



if of a kind involving the progress of our own race, we know 

 that civilisation in the long-run is only arrived at — even 

 under the most favourable circumstances — by slow and 

 gradual stages. 



G-uided by these methods, the pile-dwellings in lakes (the 

 pfahlbauten of Switzerland and the crannoges of Ireland) 

 carry us back to the earlier Celtic times, and may range 

 from two to four thousand years,- but clearly they are not 

 of the vast antiquity some archaeologists have imagined, 

 and though pre-historic in Europe, may have been contem- 

 porary with historical events in Egypt and Western Asia. 

 Estimated by the implement-scale, they belong alike to the 

 ages of iron, bronze, and stone, and mark the long occu- 

 pancy of South-western Europe by the same partially civilised 

 but gradually improving race. As regards the shell-mounds 

 (the Kjokken-modding of Denmark) and the cave-dwellings 

 of Belgium and France, they seem to indicate the pre- 

 sence of a pre-Celtic people, simpler in their mode of life, 

 less civilised, and only acquainted with the use of imple- 

 ments in stone, wood, and bone. Smaller in stature than 

 the Celt, round-headed, hunters and fishers, these pre-Celtic 

 races never seem to have cultivated the soil, or to have 

 settled down in fixed situations. Western Europe appears 

 to have been their home before the Celts left the mountains 

 of the East ; and five or six thousand years ago may mark 

 the date of their occupancy of the regions where now are 

 found their shell-mounds, cave-dwellings, and kindred re- 

 liquiae. Still earlier than these pre- Celts, Southern Europe 

 to the shores of the Mediterranean, and Western Europe to 

 the limits of the British Islands, seem to have been occu- 

 pied by a ruder but perhaps kindred race — the fashioners of 

 flint implements, and the contemporaries of the reindeer, 

 the mammoth, and woolly rhinoceros. Eeindeer, hairy 

 elephants, and woolly rhinoceroses, in the latitudes of France 

 and England, bespeak a severer climate than at present pre- 

 vails, and under this boreal climate these rude races seem 

 to have earned a scanty subsistence, by hunting and fishing 

 along shore, by lake, and by river-side. And it is generally 

 in such situations that their flint implements , are found 



