322 Proceedings of the Boyal 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. 
Guided by these methods, the pile-dwellings in lakes (the 
pfahlhauten 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 archasologists 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 Kjohhen-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- 
liquise. 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 
