1894-95.] Dr R. Munro on Lahe-clivelling Research. 
385 
A Sketch of Lake-dwelling Research. By Robert Munro, 
M.A., M.D. 
(An Address delivered at the request of the Council, March 4, 1895.) 
The comparative security afford sd to birds by island-retreats 
could not fail to have attracted the attention of man from the very 
dawn of his reasoning faculties, and it is probable that, as 
soon as he acquired sufficient skill to enable him to cross a 
creek or a river, he occasionally resorted to such means of pro- 
tection. From the natural to the artificial island was but a stage 
of transition which, in the course of time, would be readily bridged 
over by his progress in mechanical knowledge. To some such 
sequence in the phenomena of human civilisation must be assigned 
the origin of those strange habitations known as lake-dwellings. 
As a means of defence, an island-fort, or village, rudely constructed 
of timber and situated on the shallow margin of a lake, could offer 
but little resistance against an attack conducted on the principles of 
modern warfare. Very different, however, would be the result 
where the assailers were limited to the appliances in use in pre- 
and proto-historic times. On this point we are not without some 
historical evidence, as it is recorded that the dwellers in Lake 
Prasias successfully defied the military resources of a Persian army ; 
and even, as late as 1566, an attacking party from an English 
army under Deputy Lord Sydney equally failed to capture a 
crannog near Omagh, in Ireland. But whatever may have been 
the primary object of these structures, or the precise circumstances 
which led to their development, one thing is certain that they 
continued, for many centuries, to be the characteristic abodes of 
the early inhabitants of Central Europe wherever the necessary 
hydrographical conditions were to be found. The remarkable 
development of the system in Central Europe during the Stone and 
Bronze Ages seems to have come to a sudden end within pre- 
historic times, and, indeed, so completely had the custom fallen 
into desuetude, that scarcely a trace of it has survived in the 
VOL. XX. 6/5/95. 2 B 
