148 
ELEMENTS OF GEOLOGY. 
bronze. It appears that a race more advanced in civiliza- ^ 
tion, armed with weapons of that mixed metal, invaded Scan¬ 
dinavia, and ousted the aborigines. 
Lacustrine Habitations of Switzerland —In Switzerland a 
different class of monuments, illustrating the successive ages 
of stone, bronze, and iron, has been of late years investigated 
with great success, and especially since 1854, in which year 
Dr. F. Keller explored near the shore at Meilen, in the bot¬ 
tom of the lake of Zurich, the ruins of an old village, origi¬ 
nally built on numerous wooden piles, driven, at some un¬ 
known period, into the muddy bed of the lake. Since then 
a great many other localities, more than a hundred and fifty 
in all, have been detected of similar pile-dwellings, situated 
near the borders of the Swiss lakes, at points where the depth 
of water does not exceed 15 feet.^ The superficial mud in 
such cases is filled with various articles, many hundreds of 
them being often dredged up from a very limited area. 
Thousands of piles, decayed at their upper extremities, are 
often met with still firmly fixed in the mud. 
As the ages of stone, bronze, and iron merely indicate suc¬ 
cessive stages of civilization, they may all have coexisted at 
once in different parts of the globe, and even in contiguous 
regions, among nations having little intercourse with each 
other. To make out, therefore, a distinct chronological se¬ 
ries of monuments is only possible when our observations are 
confined to a limited district, such as Switzerland. 
The relative antiquity of the pile-dwellings, which belong 
respectively to the ages of stone and bronze, is clearly illus¬ 
trated by the associations of the tools with certain groups of 
animal remains. Where the tools are of stone, the castaway 
bones which served for the food of the ancient people are 
those of deer, the wild boar, and wild ox, which abounded 
when society was in the hunter state. But the bones of the 
later or bronze epoch were chiefly those of the domestic ox, 
goat, and pig, indicating progress in civilization. Some vil¬ 
lages of the stone age are of later date than others, and ex¬ 
hibit signs of an improved state of the arts. Among their 
relics are discovered carbonized grains of wheat and barley, 
and pieces of bread, proving that the cultivation of cereals 
had begun. In the same settlements, also, cloth, made of 
woven flax and straw, has been detected. 
The pottery of the bronze age in Switzerland is of a finer 
texture, and more elegant in form, than that of the age of 
stone. At Kidaii, on the lake of Bienne, articles of iron have 
* Bulletin de la Societe Yaiidoise des Sci. Nat., t. vi., Lausanne, 1860 ; and 
Antiquity of Man, by the author, ch. ii. 
