PEE-HISTORIC DWELLINGS. 
369 
M. de Silber found objects of like kind, together with some in 
copper. A lake- dwelling of probably earlier date is one met 
with beneath five feet of peat, near to Zug, from which articles 
of stone have alone been obtained. At Untersee, south of the 
village of Constance, and on the borders of that lake, M. 
DehofT found no trace of a bronze age or of metal at all. At 
Xieder-Wyl, an establishment of very early type was met with, 
though an important one by reason of the excellency of its 
preservation. Passing northwards, M. Escher contributes an 
account of a hill- dwelling, near PEbersberg, of character very 
similar to those lake- dwellings of the bronze age which occur 
in the Lake of Brienne. The lake-dwellings of Bobenhausen 
are worthy of note, those first discovered being of the bronze 
age; but on removing their relics, a lower foundation was seen, 
belonging to an older encampment. 
It is tolerably certain that some of these lake- dwellings 
were tenanted up to — it may be after — the commencement of 
the Christian era. Evidences of the influence of an exterior 
civilization greater than their own are clearly to be seen in 
the character and ornamentation of some of their bronze and 
iron implements ; and the discovery of substances such as tin, 
nephrite, Mediterranean coral, and Baltic amber, among the 
relics of their homes, prove that the people who clung so 
tenaciously to the dwelling- spots of their ancestors were not 
insensible to the advantages of communication with European 
nations. 
And this contemporaneity of a low class with a cultivated 
people has still its counterpart in the world. The hill-tribes 
of India, the Veddahs of Ceylon, and the various "men of the 
soil ” who live in the mountain fastnesses of the Malayan 
peninsula, are so many stagnant patches of human life, hud- 
dling together in the midst of active races, and holding fast by 
a few degrading traditions. By laws of human progress — and 
who shall say that “ natural selection ” is not the greatest of 
these ? — the nations in the midst of whose social lives they lie 
hidden have advanced to higher stations, while they have 
remained stationary, or as laggards in the scheme. And yet 
another law they may be regarded as exemplifying, — that 
which, though at present it is shadowed rather than laid down, 
teaches the chronology of natural phenomena to be a series of 
overlaps, the evening of one condition of terrestrial things 
having been, and still being*, co-existent with the morning of 
the succeeding era ; a most reasonable and philosophic element 
in our comprehension of geological phenomena, and one for 
which we may claim an equal value among the laws of human 
progress. 
