POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD. 
149 
also been discovered, so that this settlement was evidently 
not abandoned till that metal had come into use. 
At La Thene, in the northern angle of the lake of IS^eufcha- 
tel, a great many articles of iron have been obtained, which 
in form and ornamentation are entirely different both from 
those of the bronze period and from those used by the Ro¬ 
mans. Gaulish and Celtic coins have also been found there 
by MM. Schwab and Desor. They agree in character with 
remains, including many iron swords, which have been found 
at Tiefenau, near Berne, in ground supposed to have been a 
battle-field ; and their date appears to have been anterior to 
the great Roman invasion of Northern Europe, though per¬ 
haps not long before that event.* Coins, which sometimes 
occur in deposits of the age of iron, have never yet been 
found in formations of the ages of bronze or stone. 
The period of bronze must have been one of foreign com¬ 
merce, as tin, which enters into this metallic mixture in the 
proportion of about ten per cent, to the copper, was obtain¬ 
ed by the ancients chiefly from Cornwall.f Very few hu¬ 
man bones of the bronze period have been met with in the 
Danish peat, or in the Swiss lake-dwellings, and this scarcity 
is generally attributed by archaeologists to the custom of 
burning the dead, which prevailed in the age of bronze. 
POST-PLIOCENE PERIOD. 
From the foregoing observations we may infer that the 
ages of iron and bronze in Northern and Central Europe 
were preceded by a stone age, the Neolithic, referable to that 
division of the post-tertiary epoch which I have called Re¬ 
cent, when the mammalia as well as the other organic re¬ 
mains accompanying the stone implements were of living 
species. But memorials have of late been brought to light 
of a still older age of stone, for which, as above stated, the 
name Paleolithic has been proposed, when man was contem¬ 
porary in Europe with the elephant and rhinoceros, and va¬ 
rious other animals, of which many of the most conspicuous 
have long since died out. 
Reindeer Period in South of Prance. —In the larger number 
of the caves of Europe, as for example in those of England, 
Belgium, Germany, and many parts of France, the animal re¬ 
mains agree specifically with the fauna of this oldest division 
of the age of stone, or that to which belongs the drift of 
Amiens and Abbeville presently to be mentioned, containing 
* Sir J. Lubbock’s Lecture, Royal Institution, Feb. 27tb, 1863. 
t Diodorus, v., 21, 22, and Sir H. James, Note on Block of Tin dredged 
up in Falmouth Harbor. Royal Institution of Cornwall, 1863. 
