( 39 6 ) 
I July, 
NOTICES OF BOOKS. 
The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and other parts of Europe. 
By Dr. Ferdinand Keller. Translated and Arranged by 
John Edward Lee, F.S.A., F.G.S. In Two Volumes. 
London : Longmans and Co. 
Nature sometimes seems impatient at man’s slow progress, and 
as if she desired to assist him in his researches. A great storm 
sweeps away the sand and shingle from the coast, and bares to 
the eye of the geologist buried forests and fossiliferous strata 
containing some of the missing links in the great chain of life. 
At another time the waves cast up on the shore some curious 
inhabitant of the deep, before unknown to Science. And so, in 
Switzerland, the pile dwellings might long have remained unex- 
plored if it had not been for the great drought and extended 
frost of the winter of 1853-4, which caused the rivers to shrink 
to their smallest compass, and the level of the lakes to fall lower 
than is ever recorded in history, before this time. 
Then were exposed, in a way that could not but arouse atten- 
tion, the remains of habitations some of which are probably as 
old as the mysterious dolmens, and were used by the earliest of 
the neolithic immigrants. Notwithstanding their vast antiquity, 
the sediment at the bottoms of the quiet lakes had preserved not 
only the piles themselves, and articles of wood, stone, and pot- 
tery, but the provisions that had been stored for winter use, 
linen cloth, and fishermen’s lines and nets. The great oppor- 
tunity thus afforded for examining these remains was not neg- 
lected, and under the enthusiastic yet cautious leadership of 
Dr. Ferdinand Keller the explorations have been zealously carried 
on from that time to the present day. 
A translation of Dr. Keller’s earlier reports was published by 
Mr. Lee in 1866, and has been the principal work of reference 
for English students. Since then a great many additional dis- 
coveries have been made, not only in the lakes, but in many of 
the peat-bogs which have been proved to be filled-up lake-basins. 
The area over which the lake dwellers lived is shown to have 
extended far beyond Switzerland, into Italy, Austria, and Hun- 
gary. Now, more than ten years after the first edition, Mr. Lee 
lays us under a fresh obligation by a second, in which it is 
scarcely too much to say that the additional information is nearly 
equal to the whole contained in the first, Modestly terming it a 
translation of Dr. Keller’s memoirs, Mr. Lee gives us what is 
in reality the work rather of a student who, wishing to ascribe 
