388 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinlurgli. [sess. 
with the hark on. The area enclosed by these piles, from which 
we may judge of the size of the house, was 60 feet in length by 42 
feet in breadth.” 
Ill 1846 Mr Shirley describes, in the Archaeological Journal, two 
other crannogs — one in Lake Monalty and the other in Loch-na- 
Glack — which yielded relics of a miscellaneous character, among 
them being several objects typical of the Bronze Age, as well as 
others of mediaeval and more recent times, such as a gun-barrel and 
a pistol-lock. 
About this time the crannog of Ballinderry near Moate, County 
Meath, became known, which, judging from the number of objects 
in the Dublin Museum said to have been found in it, must have 
been also rich in relics. 
But the most important subsequent discoveries were due to the 
workings of the Commission for the Arterial Drainage and Inland 
Navigation of Ireland, which brought to light no less than 22 
crannogs throughout the Counties of Boscommon, Leitrim, Cavan, 
and Monaghan. Deports of these crannogs by the engineers of 
the Board of Works, along with plans, maps, sections, and a large 
assortment of relics, were deposited at the time in the Museum of 
the Eoyal Irish Academy. The objects collected on them would 
appear to be of the usual heterogeneous kind, but, unfortunately, 
they were indiscriminately mixed up with the other Irish 
antiquities in the museum, so that, with the exception of those 
illustrated in Wilde’s Catalogue, ' and a small collection which found 
a resting-place in the British Museum, few of them can now be 
identified. 
While these crannog investigations were thus steadily progressing 
ill Ireland, an independent discovery was announced in Switzerland 
which, not only gave a new significance to the Irish discoveries 
but, almost immediately, opened up one of the most prolific fields 
of pre-historic research which has ever come under the cognisance 
of archaeologists. This discovery was indirectly due to the ex- 
ceptional cold of the winter of 1853-54, which caused the water in 
Lake Zurich to sink to a lower level than any previously on record 
"—being one foot lower than the celebrated mark on the stone of 
Stafa, which preserves the record of a similar phenomenon in 1674. 
Ill these circumstances two of the inhabitants of Ober-Meilen 
