THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN BY CHARLES LYELL.

EVERYMAN I WILL GO WITH THEE & BE THY GUIDE IN THY MOST NEED TO GO BY THY SIDE.

EVERYMAN'S LIBRARY

EDITED BY ERNEST RHYS.

SCIENCE.

LYELL'S ANTIQUITY OF MAN

WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY R.H. RASTALL, M.A., F.G.S.

HOC SOLUM SCIO QUOD NIHIL SCIO.

THE GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN

BY

SIR CHARLES LYELL, BT., F.R.S., ETC. ETC.

LONDON: PUBLISHED BY J.M. DENT & SONS LTD. AND IN NEW YORK BY E.P. DUTTON & CO.

INTRODUCTION.

The "Antiquity of Man" was published in 1863, and ran into a third edition in the course of that year. The cause of this is not far to seek. Darwin's "Origin of Species" appeared in 1859, only four years earlier, and rapidly had its effect in drawing attention to the great problem of the origin of living beings. The theories of Darwin and Wallace brought to a head and presented in a concrete shape the somewhat vague speculations as to development and evolution which had long been floating in the minds of naturalists. In the actual working out of Darwin's great theory it is impossible to overestimate the influence of Lyell. This is made abundantly clear in Darwin's letters, and it must never be forgotten that Darwin himself was a geologist. His training in this science enabled him to grasp the import of the facts so ably marshalled by Lyell in the "Principles of Geology," a work which, as Professor Judd has clearly shown,* contributed greatly to the advancement of evolutionary theory in general. (* Judd "The Coming of Evolution" ("Cambridge Manuals of Science and Literature") Cambridge 1910 chapters 6 and 7.)

From a study of the evolution of plants and of the lower animals it was an easy and obvious transition to man, and this step was soon taken. Since in his physical structure man shows so close a resemblance to the higher animals it was a natural conclusion that the laws governing the development of the one should apply also to the other, in spite of preconceived opinions derived from authority. Unfortunately the times were then hardly ripe for a calm and logical treatment of this question: prejudice in many cases took the place of argument, and the result was too often an undignified squabble instead of a scientific discussion. However, the dogmatism was not by any means all on one side. The disciples as usual went farther than the master, and their teaching when pushed to extremities resulted in a peculiarly dreary kind of materialism, a mental attitude which still survives to a certain extent among scientific and pseudo-scientific men of the old school. In more Recent times this dogmatic agnosticism of the middle Victorian period has been gradually replaced by speculations of a more positive type, such as those of the Mendelian school in biology and the doctrines of Bergson on the philosophical side. With these later developments we are not here concerned.

In dealing with the evolution and history of man as with that of any other animal, the first step is undoubtedly to collect the facts, and this is precisely what Lyell set out to do in the "Antiquity of Man." The first nineteen chapters of the book are purely an empirical statement of the evidence then available as to the existence of man in pre-historic times: the rest of the book is devoted to a consideration of the connection between the facts previously stated and Darwin's theory of the origin of species by variation and natural selection. The keynote of Lyell's work, throughout his life, was observation. Lyell was no cabinet geologist; he went to nature and studied phenomena at first hand. Possessed of abundant leisure and ample means he travelled far and wide, patiently collecting material and building up the modern science of physical geology, whose foundations had been laid by Hutton and Playfair. From the facts thus collected he drew his inferences, and if later researches showed these inferences to be wrong, unlike some of his contemporaries, he never hesitated to say so. Thus and thus only is true progress in science attained.

Lyell is universally recognised as the leader of the Uniformitarian school of geologists, and it will be well to consider briefly what is implied in this term. The principles of Uniformitarianism may be summed up thus: THE PRESENT IS THE KEY TO THE PAST. That is to say, the processes which have gone on in the past were the same in general character as those now seen in operation, though probably differing in degree. This theory is in direct opposition to the ideas of the CATASTROPHIC school, which were dominant at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The catastrophists attributed all past changes to sudden and violent convulsions of nature, by which all living beings were destroyed, to be replaced by a fresh creation. At least such were the tenets of the extremists. In opposition to these views the school of Hutton and Lyell introduced the principle of continuity and development. There is no discrepancy between Uniformitarianism and evolution. The idea of Uniformitarianism does not imply that things have always been the same; only that they were similar, and between these two terms there is a wide distinction. Evolution of any kind whatever naturally implies continuity, and this is the fundamental idea of Lyellian geology.

In spite, however, of this clear and definite conception of natural and organic evolution, in all those parts of his works dealing with earth-history, with the stratified rocks and with the organisms entombed in them, Lyell adopted a plan which has now been universally abandoned. He began with the most Recent formations and worked backwards from the known to the unknown. To modern readers this is perhaps the greatest drawback to his work, since it renders difficult the study of events in their actual sequence. However, it must be admitted that, taking into account the state of geological knowledge before his time, this course was almost inevitable. The succession of the later rocks was fairly well known, thanks to the labours of William Smith and others, but in the lower part of the sequence of stratified rocks there were many gaps, and more important still, there was no definite base. Although this want of a starting point has been largely supplied by the labours of Sedgwick, Murchison, De la Beche, Ramsay, and a host of followers, still considerable doubt prevails as to which constitutes the oldest truly stratified series, and the difficulty has only been partially circumvented by the adoption of an arbitrary base-line, from which the succession is worked out both upwards and downwards. So the problem is only removed a stage further back. In the study of human origins a similar difficulty is felt with special acuteness; the beginnings must of necessity be vague and uncertain, and the farther back we go the fainter will naturally be the traces of human handiwork and the more primitive and doubtful those traces when discovered.

The reprinting of the "Antiquity of Man" is particularly appropriate at the present time, owing to the increased attention drawn to the subject by recent discoveries. Ever since the publication of the "Origin of Species" and the discussions that resulted from that publication, the popular imagination has been much exercised by the possible existence of forms intermediate between the apes and man; the so-called "Missing Link." Much has been written on this subject, some of it well-founded and some very much the reverse. The discovery of the Neanderthal skull is fully described in this volume, and this skull is certainly of a low type, but it is more human than ape-like. The same remark applies still more strongly to the Engis skull, the man of Spy, the recently discovered Sussex skull, and other well-known examples of early human remains. The Pithecanthropus of Java alone shows perhaps more affinity to the apes. The whole subject has been most ably discussed by Professor Sollas in his recent book entitled "Ancient Hunters."

The study of Palaeolithic flint implements has been raised to a fine art. Both in England and France a regular succession of primitive types has been established and correlated with the gravel terraces of existing rivers, and even with the deposits of rivers no longer existing and with certain glacial deposits. But with all of these the actual bodily remains of man are comparatively scanty. From this it may be concluded that primitive methods of burial were such as to be unfavourable to the actual preservation of human remains. Attempts have also been made to prove the existence of man in pre-glacial times, but hitherto none of these have met with general acceptance, since in no case is the evidence beyond doubt.

One of the most important results of recent research in the subject has been the establishment of the existence of man in interglacial times. When Lyell wrote, it was not fully recognised that the glaciation of Europe was not one continuous process, but that it could be divided into several episodes, glaciations, or advances of the ice, separated by a warm interglacial period. The monumental researches of Penck and Bruckner in the Alps have there established four glaciations with mild interglacial periods, but all of these cannot be clearly traced in Britain. One very important point also is the recognition of the affinities of certain types of Palaeolithic man to the Eskimo, the Australians, and the Bushmen of South Africa. However, it is impossible to give here a review of the whole subject. Full details of recent researches will be found in the works mentioned in the notes at the end of the book.

Another point of great interest and importance, arising directly from the study of early man is the nature of the events constituting the glacial period in Britain and elsewhere. This has been for many years a fertile subject of controversy, and is likely to continue such. Lyell, in common with most of the geologists of his day, assumes that during the glacial period the British Isles were submerged under the sea to a depth of many hundreds of feet, at any rate as regards the region north of a line drawn from London to Bristol. Later authors, however, explained the observed phenomena on the hypothesis of a vast ice-sheet of the Greenland type, descending from the mountains of Scotland and Scandinavia, filling up the North Sea and spreading over eastern England. This explanation is now accepted by the majority, but it must be recognised that it involves enormous mechanical difficulties. It is impossible to pursue the subject here; for a full discussion reference may be made to Professor Bonney's presidential address to the British Association at Sheffield in 1910.

It will be seen, therefore, that the "Antiquity of Man" opens up a wide field of speculation into a variety of difficult and obscure though interesting subjects. In the light of modern research it would be an easy task to pile up a mountain of criticism on points of detail. But, though easy, it would be a thankless task. It is scarcely too much to say that the dominant impression of most readers after perusing this book will be one of astonishment and admiration at the insight and breadth of view displayed by the author. When it was written the subject was a particularly thorny one to handle, and it undoubtedly required much courage to tackle the origin and development of the human race from a purely critical and scientific standpoint. It must be admitted on all hands that the result was eminently successful, taking into account the paucity of the available material, and the "Antiquity of Man" must ever remain one of the classics of prehistoric archaeology.

This edition of the "Antiquity of Man" has been undertaken in order to place before the public in an easily accessible form one of the best known works of the great geologist Sir Charles Lyell; the book had an immense influence in its own day, and it still remains one of the best general accounts of an increasingly important branch of knowledge.

In order to avoid a multiplicity of notes and thus to save space, the nomenclature has been to a certain extent modernised: a new general table of strata has been inserted in the first chapter, in place of the one originally there printed, which was cumbrous and included many minor subdivisions of unnecessary minuteness.

The notes have been kept as short as possible, and they frequently contain little more than references to recent literature elucidating the points under discussion in the text.

R.H. RASTALL. 1914.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

The passage of the Beresina (in verse), 1815.

Principles of Geology, being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation, 1830-33 (third edition, 1834; fourth, 1835; fifth, 1837; sixth, 1840; seventh, 1847; ninth, entirely revised edition, 1853; tenth, entirely revised edition, 1867, 1868; eleventh, entirely revised edition, 1872; twelfth, edited by L. Lyell, 1875).

Elements of Geology, 1838 (second edition, 1841).

A Manual of Elementary Geology (third and entirely revised edition of the former work, 1851; fourth and entirely revised edition, 1852; fifth, enlarged edition, 1855; Supplement to the fifth edition, 1857; second edition of the Supplement, revised, 1857).

Elements of Geology, sixth edition, greatly enlarged, 1865.

Travels in North America, with geological observations on the United States, Canada, and Nova Scotia, 1845.

A Second Visit to the United States of North America, 1849.

The Students' Elements of Geology, 1871 (second edition, revised and corrected, 1874; third, revised, with a table of British fossils [by R. Etheridge], 1878; fourth, revised by P.M. Duncan, with a table of British fossils [by R. Etheridge], 1884).

The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with remarks on theories of the origin of species by variation, 1863; (second edition, revised, 1863; third edition, revised, 1863; fourth edition, revised, 1873).

There has also been published The Student's Lyell: a Manual of Elementary Geology, edited by J.W. Judd, 1896 (second edition revised and enlarged, 1911).

LECTURES, ADDRESSES, AND ARTICLES:

On a Recent Formation of Freshwater Limestone in Forfarshire ("Transactions of the Geological Society" 2nd series, volume 2, 1826, part 1).

On a Dike of Serpentine in the County of Forfar ("Edinburgh Journal of Science" 1825).

English Scientific Societies ("Quarterly Review" volume 34; three papers with Sir Roderick and Mrs. Murchison ("Edinburgh Philosophical Journal," 1829; abstract in "Proceedings of the Geological Society" 1; "Annales des Sciences Naturelles" 1829; abstract in "Proceedings of the Geological Society" 1).

Address delivered at the Geological Society of London, 1836.

Lectures on Geology—Eight Lectures on Geology, delivered at the Broadway Tabernacle, New York ("New York Tribune" 1842).

A Paper on Madeira ("Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" 10, 1853).

On the Structure of Lavas which have Consolidated on Steep Slopes ("Philosophical Transactions" 1858).

Address (to the British Association) 1864.

TRANSLATIONS:

Antiquity of Man, translated into French by M. Chaper, 1864; and into German by L. Buchner, 1874.

Elements of Geology (sixth edition), translated into French by M. J. Gineston, 1867.

Report, extracted from the "Aberdeen Free Press" and translated into French, of Sir C. Lyell's address before the British Association, 1859, under the title of Antiquities antediluviennes: L'homme fossile.

LIFE:

Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, edited by his sister-in-law, Mrs. Lyell, 1881.

See also:

Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, 1887.

Life and Letters of Sedgwick, by Clark and Hughes, 1890.



CONTENTS.

CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTORY.

Preliminary Remarks on the Subjects treated of in this Work. Definition of the terms Recent and Pleistocene. Tabular View of the entire Series of Fossiliferous Strata.

CHAPTER 2.

RECENT PERIOD—DANISH PEAT AND SHELL MOUNDS— SWISS LAKE-DWELLINGS.

Works of Art in Danish Peat-Mosses. Remains of three Periods of Vegetation in the Peat. Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Shell-Mounds or ancient Refuse-Heaps of the Danish Islands. Change in geographical Distribution of Marine Mollusca since their Origin. Embedded Remains of Mammalia of Recent Species. Human Skulls of the same Period. Swiss Lake-Dwellings built on Piles. Stone and Bronze Implements found in them. Fossil Cereals and other Plants. Remains of Mammalia, wild and domesticated. No extinct Species. Chronological Computations of the Date of the Bronze and Stone Periods in Switzerland. Lake-Dwellings, or artificial Islands called "Crannoges," in Ireland.

CHAPTER 3.

FOSSIL HUMAN REMAINS AND WORKS OF ART OF THE RECENT PERIOD—continued.

Delta and Alluvial Plain of the Nile. Burnt Bricks in Egypt before the Roman Era. Borings in 1851-54. Ancient Mounds of the Valley of the Ohio. Their Antiquity. Sepulchral Mound at Santos in Brazil. Delta of the Mississippi. Ancient Human Remains in Coral Reefs of Florida. Changes in Physical Geography in the Human Period. Buried Canoes in Marine Strata near Glasgow. Upheaval since the Roman Occupation of the Shores of the Firth of Forth. Fossil Whales near Stirling. Upraised Marine Strata of Sweden on Shores of the Baltic and the Ocean. Attempts to compute their Age.

CHAPTER 4.

PLEISTOCENE PERIOD—BONES OF MAN AND EXTINCT MAMMALIA IN BELGIAN CAVERNS.

Earliest Discoveries in Caves of Languedoc of Human Remains with Bones of extinct Mammalia. Researches in 1833 of Dr. Schmerling in the Liege Caverns. Scattered Portions of Human Skeletons associated with Bones of Elephant and Rhinoceros. Distribution and probable Mode of Introduction of the Bones. Implements of Flint and Bone. Schmerling's Conclusions as to the Antiquity of Man ignored. Present State of the Belgian Caves. Human Bones recently found in Cave of Engihoul. Engulfed Rivers. Stalagmitic Crust. Antiquity of the Human Remains in Belgium how proved.

CHAPTER 5.

PLEISTOCENE PERIOD—FOSSIL HUMAN SKULLS OF THE NEANDERTHAL AND ENGIS CAVES.

Human Skeleton found in Cave near Dusseldorf. Its geological Position and probable Age. Its abnormal and ape-like Characters. Fossil Human Skull of the Engis Cave near Liege. Professor Huxley's Description of these Skulls. Comparison of each, with extreme Varieties of the native Australian Race. Range of Capacity in the Human and Simian Brains. Skull from Borreby in Denmark. Conclusions of Professor Huxley. Bearing of the peculiar Characters of the Neanderthal Skull on the Hypothesis of Transmutation.

CHAPTER 6.

PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM AND CAVE DEPOSITS WITH FLINT IMPLEMENTS.

General Position of Drift with extinct Mammalia in Valleys. Discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes at Abbeville. Flint Implements found also at St. Acheul, near Amiens. Curiosity awakened by the systematic Exploration of the Brixham Cave. Flint Knives in same, with Bones of extinct Mammalia. Superposition of Deposits in the Cave. Visits of English and French Geologists to Abbeville and Amiens.

CHAPTER 7.

PEAT AND PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM OF THE VALLEY OF THE SOMME.

Geological Structure of the Valley of the Somme and of the surrounding Country. Position of Alluvium of different Ages. Peat near Abbeville. Its animal and vegetable Contents. Works of Art in Peat. Probable Antiquity of the Peat, and Changes of Level since its Growth began. Flint Implements of antique Type in older Alluvium. Their various Forms and great Numbers.

CHAPTER 8.

PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM WITH FLINT IMPLEMENTS OF THE VALLEY OF THE SOMME—concluded.

Fluvio-marine Strata, with Flint Implements, near Abbeville. Marine Shells in same. Cyrena fluminalis. Mammalia. Entire Skeleton of Rhinoceros. Flint Implements, why found low down in Fluviatile Deposits. Rivers shifting their Channels. Relative Ages of higher and lower-level Gravels. Section of Alluvium of St. Acheul. Two Species of Elephant and Hippopotamus coexisting with Man in France. Volume of Drift, proving Antiquity of Flint Implements. Absence of Human Bones in tool-bearing Alluvium, how explained. Value of certain Kinds of negative Evidence tested thereby. Human Bones not found in drained Lake of Haarlem.

CHAPTER 9.

WORKS OF ART IN PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM OF FRANCE AND ENGLAND.

Flint Implements in ancient Alluvium of the Basin of the Seine. Bones of Man and of extinct Mammalia in the Cave of Arcy. Extinct Mammalia in the Valley of the Oise. Flint Implement in Gravel of same Valley. Works of Art in Pleistocene Drift in Valley of the Thames. Musk Ox. Meeting of northern and southern Fauna. Migrations of Quadrupeds. Mammals of Mongolia. Chronological Relation of the older Alluvium of the Thames to the Glacial Drift. Flint Implements of Pleistocene Period in Surrey, Middlesex, Kent, Bedfordshire, and Suffolk.

CHAPTER 10.

CAVERN DEPOSITS, AND PLACES OF SEPULTURE OF THE PLEISTOCENE PERIOD.

Flint Implements in Cave containing Hyaena and other extinct Mammalia in Somersetshire. Caves of the Gower Peninsula in South Wales. Rhinoceros hemitoechus. Ossiferous Caves near Palermo. Sicily once part of Africa. Rise of Bed of the Mediterranean to the Height of three hundred Feet in the Human Period in Sardinia. Burial-place of Pleistocene Date of Aurignac in the South of France. Rhinoceros tichorhinus eaten by Man. M. Lartet on extinct Mammalia and Works of Art found in the Aurignac Cave. Relative Antiquity of the same considered.

CHAPTER 11.

AGE OF HUMAN FOSSILS OF LE PUY IN CENTRAL FRANCE AND OF NATCHEZ ON THE MISSISSIPPI DISCUSSED.

Question as to the Authenticity of the Fossil Man of Denise, near Le Puy-en-Velay, considered. Antiquity of the Human Race implied by that Fossil. Successive Periods of Volcanic Action in Central France. With what Changes in the Mammalian Fauna they correspond. The Elephas meridionalis anterior in Time to the Implement-bearing Gravel of St. Acheul. Authenticity of the Human Fossil of Natchez on the Mississippi discussed. The Natchez Deposit, containing Bones of Mastodon and Megalonyx, probably not older than the Flint Implements of St. Acheul.

CHAPTER 12.

ANTIQUITY OF MAN RELATIVELY TO THE GLACIAL PERIOD AND TO THE EXISTING FAUNA AND FLORA.

Chronological Relation of the Glacial Period, and the earliest known Signs of Man's Appearance in Europe. Series of Tertiary Deposits in Norfolk and Suffolk immediately antecedent to the Glacial Period. Gradual Refrigeration of Climate proved by the Marine Shells of successive Groups. Marine Newer Pliocene Shells of Northern Character near Woodbridge. Section of the Norfolk Cliffs. Norwich Crag. Forest Bed and Fluvio-marine Strata. Fossil Plants and Mammalia of the same. Overlying Boulder Clay and Contorted Drift. Newer freshwater Formation of Mundesley compared to that of Hoxne. Great Oscillations of Level implied by the Series of Strata in the Norfolk Cliffs. Earliest known Date of Man long subsequent to the existing Fauna and Flora.

CHAPTER 13.

CHRONOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE GLACIAL PERIOD AND THE EARLIEST SIGNS OF MAN'S APPEARANCE IN EUROPE.

Chronological Relations of the Close of the Glacial Period and the earliest geological Signs of the Appearance of Man. Effects of Glaciers and Icebergs in polishing and scoring Rocks. Scandinavia once encrusted with Ice like Greenland. Outward Movement of Continental Ice in Greenland. Mild Climate of Greenland in the Miocene Period. Erratics of Recent Period in Sweden. Glacial State of Sweden in the Pleistocene Period. Scotland formerly encrusted with Ice. Its subsequent Submergence and Re-elevation. Latest Changes produced by Glaciers in Scotland. Remains of the Mammoth and Reindeer in Scotch Boulder Clay. Parallel Roads of Glen Roy formed in Glacier Lakes. Comparatively modern Date of these Shelves.

CHAPTER 14.

CHRONOLOGICAL RELATIONS OF THE GLACIAL PERIOD AND THE EARLIEST SIGNS OF MAN'S APPEARANCE IN EUROPE—continued.

Signs of extinct Glaciers in Wales. Great Submergence of Wales during the Glacial Period proved by Marine Shells. Still greater Depression inferred from Stratified Drift. Scarcity of Organic Remains in Glacial Formations. Signs of extinct Glaciers in England. Ice Action in Ireland. Maps illustrating successive Revolutions in Physical Geography during the Pleistocene Period. Southernmost Extent of Erratics in England. Successive Periods of Junction and Separation of England, Ireland, and the Continent. Time required for these Changes. Probable Causes of the Upheaval and Subsidence of the Earth's Crust. Antiquity of Man considered in relation to the Age of the existing Fauna and Flora.

CHAPTER 15.

EXTINCT GLACIERS OF THE ALPS AND THEIR CHRONOLOGICAL RELATION TO THE HUMAN PERIOD.

Extinct Glaciers of Switzerland. Alpine Erratic Blocks on the Jura. Not transported by floating Ice. Extinct Glaciers of the Italian Side of the Alps. Theory of the Origin of Lake-Basins by the erosive Action of Glaciers considered. Successive phases in the Development of Glacial Action in the Alps. Probable Relation of these to the earliest known Date of Man. Correspondence of the same with successive Changes in the Glacial Condition of the Scandinavian and British Mountains. Cold Period in Sicily and Syria.

CHAPTER 16.

HUMAN REMAINS IN THE LOESS, AND THEIR PROBABLE AGE.

Nature, Origin, and Age of the Loess of the Rhine and Danube. Impalpable Mud produced by the Grinding Action of Glaciers. Dispersion of this Mud at the Period of the Retreat of the great Alpine Glaciers. Continuity of the Loess from Switzerland to the Low Countries. Characteristic Organic Remains not Lacustrine. Alpine Gravel in the Valley of the Rhine covered by Loess. Geographical Distribution of the Loess and its Height above the Sea. Fossil Mammalia. Loess of the Danube. Oscillations in the Level of the Alps and lower Country required to explain the Formation and Denudation of the Loess. More rapid Movement of the Inland Country. The same Depression and Upheaval might account for the Advance and Retreat of the Alpine Glaciers. Himalayan Mud of the Plains of the Ganges compared to European Loess. Human Remains in Loess near Maestricht, and their probable Antiquity.

CHAPTER 17.

POST-GLACIAL DISLOCATIONS AND FOLDINGS OF CRETACEOUS AND DRIFT STRATA IN THE ISLAND OF MOEN, IN DENMARK.

Geological Structure of the Island of Moen. Great Disturbances of the Chalk posterior in Date to the Glacial Drift, with Recent Shells. M. Puggaard's Sections of the Cliffs of Moen. Flexures and Faults common to the Chalk and Glacial Drift. Different Direction of the Lines of successive Movement, Fracture, and Flexure. Undisturbed Condition of the Rocks in the adjoining Danish Islands. Unequal Movements of Upheaval in Finmark. Earthquake of New Zealand in 1855. Predominance in all Ages of uniform Continental Movements over those by which the Rocks are locally convulsed.

CHAPTER 18.

THE GLACIAL PERIOD IN NORTH AMERICA.

Post-glacial Strata containing Remains of Mastodon giganteus in North America. Scarcity of Marine Shells in Glacial Drift of Canada and the United States. Greater southern Extension of Ice-action in North America than in Europe. Trains of Erratic Blocks of vast Size in Berkshire, Massachusetts. Description of their Linear Arrangement and Points of Departure. Their Transportation referred to Floating and Coast Ice. General Remarks on the Causes of former Changes of Climate at successive geological Epochs. Supposed Effects of the Diversion of the Gulf Stream in a Northerly instead of North-Easterly Direction. Development of extreme Cold on the opposite Sides of the Atlantic in the Glacial period not strictly simultaneous. Effect of Marine Currents on Climate. Pleistocene Submergence of the Sahara.

CHAPTER 19.

RECAPITULATION OF GEOLOGICAL PROOFS OF MAN'S ANTIQUITY.

Recapitulation of Results arrived at in the earlier Chapters. Ages of Stone and Bronze. Danish Peat and Kitchen-Middens. Swiss Lake-Dwellings. Local Changes in Vegetation and in the wild and domesticated Animals and in Physical Geography coeval with the Age of Bronze and the later Stone Period. Estimates of the positive Date of some Deposits of the later Stone Period. Ancient Division of the Age of Stone of St. Acheul and Aurignac. Migrations of Man in that Period from the Continent to England in Post-Glacial Times. Slow Rate of Progress in barbarous Ages. Doctrine of the superior Intelligence and Endowments of the original Stock of Mankind considered. Opinions of the Greeks and Romans, and their Coincidence with those of the Modern Progressionist.

CHAPTER 20.

THEORIES OF PROGRESSION AND TRANSMUTATION.

Antiquity and Persistence in Character of the existing Races of Mankind. Theory of their Unity of Origin considered. Bearing of the Diversity of Races on the Doctrine of Transmutation. Difficulty of defining the Terms "Species" and "Race." Lamarck's Introduction of the Element of Time into the Definition of a Species. His Theory of Variation and Progression. Objections to his Theory, how far answered. Arguments of modern Writers in favour of Progression in the Animal and Vegetable World. The old Landmarks supposed to indicate the first Appearance of Man, and of different Classes of Animals, found to be erroneous. Yet the Theory of an advancing Series of Organic Beings not inconsistent with Facts. Earliest known Fossil Mammalia of low Grade. No Vertebrata as yet discovered in the oldest Fossiliferous Rocks. Objections to the Theory of Progression considered. Causes of the Popularity of the Doctrine of Progression as compared to that of Transmutation.

CHAPTER 21.

ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES BY VARIATION AND NATURAL SELECTION.

Mr. Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Memoir by Mr. Wallace. Manner in which favoured Races prevail in the Struggle for Existence. Formation of new Races by breeding. Hypotheses of definite and indefinite Modifiability equally arbitrary. Competition and Extinction of Races. Progression not a necessary Accompaniment of Variation. Distinct Classes of Phenomena which Natural Selection explains. Unity of Type, Rudimentary Organs, Geographical Distribution, Relation of the extinct to the living Fauna and Flora, and mutual Relations of successive Groups of Fossil Forms. Light thrown on Embryological Development by Natural Selection. Why large Genera have more variable Species than small ones. Dr. Hooker on the Evidence afforded by the Vegetable Kingdom in favour of Creation by Variation. Steenstrup on alternation of Generations. How far the Doctrine of Independent Creation is opposed to the Laws now governing the Migration of Species.

CHAPTER 22.

OBJECTIONS TO THE HYPOTHESIS OF TRANSMUTATION CONSIDERED.

Statement of Objections to the Hypothesis of Transmutation founded on the Absence of Intermediate Forms. Genera of which the Species are closely allied. Occasional Discovery of the missing Links in a Fossil State. Davidson's Monograph on the Brachiopoda. Why the Gradational Forms, when found, are not accepted as Evidence of Transmutation. Gaps caused by Extinction of Races and Species. Vast Tertiary Periods during which this Extinction has been going on in the Fauna and Flora now existing. Genealogical Bond between Miocene and Recent Plants and Insects. Fossils of Oeningen. Species of Insects in Britain and North America represented by distinct Varieties. Falconer's Monograph on living and fossil Elephants. Fossil Species and Genera of the Horse Tribe in North and South America. Relation of the Pliocene Mammalia of North America, Asia, and Europe. Species of Mammalia, though less persistent than the Mollusca, change slowly. Arguments for and against Transmutation derived from the Absence of Mammalia in Islands. Imperfection of the Geological Record. Intercalation of newly discovered Formation of intermediate Age in the chronological Series. Reference of the St. Cassian Beds to the Triassic Periods. Discovery of new organic Types. Feathered Archaeopteryx of the Oolite.

CHAPTER 23.

ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGES AND SPECIES COMPARED.

Aryan Hypothesis and Controversy. The Races of Mankind change more slowly than their Languages. Theory of the gradual Origin of Languages. Difficulty of defining what is meant by a Language as distinct from a Dialect. Great Number of extinct and living Tongues. No European Language a Thousand Years old. Gaps between Languages, how caused. Imperfection of the Record. Changes always in Progress. Struggle for Existence between rival Terms and Dialects. Causes of Selection. Each Language formed slowly in a single Geographical Area. May die out gradually or suddenly. Once lost can never be revived. Mode of Origin of Languages and Species a Mystery. Speculations as to the Number of original Languages or Species unprofitable.

CHAPTER 24.

BEARING OF THE DOCTRINE OF TRANSMUTATION ON THE ORIGIN OF MAN, AND HIS PLACE IN THE CREATION.

Whether Man can be regarded as an Exception to the Rule if the Doctrine of Transmutation be embraced for the rest of the Animal Kingdom. Zoological Relations of Man to other Mammalia. Systems of Classification. Term Quadrumanous, why deceptive. Whether the Structure of the Human Brain entitles Man to form a distinct Sub-class of the Mammalia. Intelligence of the lower Animals compared to the Intellect and Reason of Man. Grounds on which Man has been referred to a distinct Kingdom of Nature. Immaterial Principle common to Man and Animals. Non-discovery of intermediate Links among Fossil Anthropomorphous Species. Hallam on the compound Nature of Man, and his Place in the Creation. Great Inequality of mental Endowment in different Human Races and Individuals developed by Variation and ordinary Generation. How far a corresponding Divergence in physical Structure may result from the Working of the same Causes. Concluding remarks.

NOTES.

(PLATES AND FIGURES.

PLATE 1. A VILLAGE BUILT ON PILES IN A SWISS LAKE.

FIGURE 1. SECTION OF THE NEANDERTHAL CAVE.

FIGURE 2. SIDE VIEW OF THE CAST OF PART OF A HUMAN SKULL FOUND BY DR. SCHMERLING EMBEDDED AMONGST THE REMAINS OF EXTINCT MAMMALIA IN THE CAVE OF ENGIS.

FIGURE 3. SIDE VIEW OF THE CAST OF A PART OF A HUMAN SKULL FROM A CAVE IN THE NEANDERTHAL.

FIGURE 4. OUTLINE OF THE SKULL OF AN ADULT CHIMPANZEE, OF THAT FROM THE NEANDERTHAL, AND OF THAT OF A EUROPEAN.

FIGURE 5. SKULL ASSOCIATED WITH GROUND FLINT IMPLEMENTS.

FIGURE 6. OUTLINES OF THE SKULL FROM THE NEANDERTHAL, OF AN AUSTRALIAN SKULL FROM PORT ADELAIDE, AND OF THE SKULL FROM THE CAVE OF ENGIS.

FIGURE 7. SECTION ACROSS THE VALLEY OF THE SOMME IN PICARDY.

FIGURE 8. FLINT IMPLEMENT FROM ST. ACHEUL, NEAR AMIENS, OF THE SPEAR-HEAD SHAPE.

FIGURE 9. OVAL-SHAPED FLINT HATCHET FROM MAUTORT.

FIGURE 10. FLINT TOOL FROM ST. ACHEUL.

FIGURES 11, 12 AND 13. DENDRITES ON SURFACES OF FLINT HATCHETS IN THE DRIFT OF ST. ACHEUL.

FIGURE 14. FLINT KNIFE OR FLAKE FROM BELOW THE SAND CONTAINING Cyrena fluminalis.

FIGURE 15. FOSSILS OF THE WHITE CHALK.

FIGURE 16. SECTION OF FLUVIO-MARINE STRATA, CONTAINING FLINT IMPLEMENTS AND BONES OF EXTINCT MAMMALIA.

FIGURE 17. Cyrena fluminalis, O.F. Muller, sp.

FIGURE 18. Elephas primigenius.

FIGURE 19. Elephas antiquus, Falconer.

FIGURE 20. Elephas meridionalis, Nesti.

FIGURE 21. SECTION OF GRAVEL PIT CONTAINING FLINT IMPLEMENTS AT ST. ACHEUL.

FIGURE 22. CONTORTED FLUVIATILE STRATA AT ST. ACHEUL.

FIGURE 23. SECTION ACROSS THE VALLEY OF THE OUSE.

FIGURE 24. SECTION SHOWING THE POSITION OF THE FLINT WEAPONS AT HOXNE.

FIGURE 25. SECTION OF PART OF THE HILL OF FAJOLES.

FIGURE 26. SECTION THROUGH THE ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

FIGURE 27. DIAGRAM TO ILLUSTRATE THE GENERAL SUCCESSION OF THE STRATA IN THE NORFOLK CLIFFS.

FIGURE 28. Cyclas (Pisidium) amnica var.(?)

FIGURE 29. CLIFF 50 FEET HIGH BETWEEN BACTON GAP AND MUNDESLEY.

FIGURE 30. FOLDING OF THE STRATA BETWEEN EAST AND WEST RUNTON.

FIGURE 31. SECTION OF CONCENTRIC BEDS WEST OF CROMER.

FIGURE 32. INCLUDED PINNACLE OF CHALK AT OLD HYTHE POINT.

FIGURE 33. SECTION OF THE NEWER FRESH-WATER FORMATION IN THE CLIFFS AT MUNDESLEY.

FIGURE 34. Paludina marginata, Michaud (P. minuta, Strickland). Hydrobia marginata.

FIGURE 35. OVAL AND FLATTISH PEBBLES.

PLATE 2. VIEW OF THE MOUTHS OF GLEN ROY AND GLEN SPEAN.

FIGURE 36. MAP OF THE PARALLEL ROADS OF GLEN ROY.

FIGURE 37. SECTION THROUGH SIDE OF LOCH.

FIGURE 38. DOME-SHAPED ROCKS, OR "ROCHES MOUTONEES."

FIGURE 39. MAP OF THE BRITISH ISLES AND PART OF THE NORTH-WEST OF EUROPE, SHOWING THE GREAT AMOUNT OF SUPPOSED SUBMERGENCE OF LAND BENEATH THE SEA DURING PART OF THE GLACIAL PERIOD.

FIGURE 40. MAP SHOWING WHAT PARTS OF THE BRITISH ISLANDS WOULD REMAIN ABOVE WATER AFTER A SUBSIDENCE OF THE AREA TO THE EXTENT OF 600 FEET.

FIGURE 41. MAP OF PART OF THE NORTH-WEST OF EUROPE, INCLUDING THE BRITISH ISLES, SHOWING THE EXTENT OF SEA WHICH WOULD BECOME LAND IF THERE WERE A GENERAL RISE OF THE AREA TO THE EXTENT OF 600 FEET.

FIGURE 42. MAP SHOWING THE SUPPOSED COURSE OF THE ANCIENT AND NOW EXTINCT GLACIER OF THE RHONE.

FIGURE 43. MAP OF THE MORAINES OF EXTINCT GLACIERS EXTENDING FROM THE ALPS INTO THE PLAINS OF THE PO NEAR TURIN.

FIGURE 44. Succinea oblonga.

FIGURE 45. Pupa muscorum.

FIGURE 46. Helix hispida, Lin.; H. plebeia, Drap.

FIGURE 47. SOUTHERN EXTREMITY OF MOENS KLINT.

FIGURE 48. SECTION OF MOENS KLINT.

FIGURE 49. POST-GLACIAL DISTURBANCES OF VERTICAL, FOLDED, AND SHIFTED STRATA OF CHALK AND DRIFT, IN THE DRONNINGESTOL.

FIGURE 50. MAP SHOWING THE RELATIVE POSITION AND DIRECTION OF SEVEN TRAINS OF ERRATIC BLOCKS IN BERKSHIRE, MASSACHUSETTS, AND IN PART OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK.

FIGURE 51. ERRATIC DOME-SHAPED BLOCK OF COMPACT CHLORITIC ROCK.

FIGURE 52. SECTION SHOWING THE POSITION OF THE BLOCK IN FIGURE 51.

FIGURE 53. SECTION THROUGH CANAAN AND RICHMOND VALLEYS AT A TIME WHEN THEY WERE MARINE CHANNELS.

FIGURE 54. UPPER SURFACE OF BRAIN OF CHIMPANZEE, DISTORTED.

FIGURE 55. SIDE VIEW OF BRAIN OF CHIMPANZEE, DISTORTED.

FIGURE 56. CORRECT SIDE VIEW OF CHIMPANZEE'S BRAIN.

FIGURE 57. CORRECT VIEW OF UPPER SURFACE OF CHIMPANZEE'S BRAIN.

FIGURE 58. SIDE VIEW OF HUMAN BRAIN.)

***



GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE OF THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

CHAPTER 1.

INTRODUCTORY.

Preliminary Remarks on the Subjects treated of in this Work. Definition of the Terms Recent and Pleistocene. Tabular View of the entire Series of Fossiliferous Strata.

No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race—whether or no we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or "diluvium," to prove the former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia. For the last half-century the occasional occurrence in various parts of Europe of the bones of Man or the works of his hands in cave-breccias and stalagmites, associated with the remains of the extinct hyaena, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros, has given rise to a suspicion that the date of Man must be carried farther back than we had heretofore imagined. On the other hand extreme reluctance was naturally felt on the part of scientific reasoners to admit the validity of such evidence, seeing that so many caves have been inhabited by a succession of tenants and have been selected by Man as a place not only of domicile, but of sepulture, while some caves have also served as the channels through which the waters of occasional land-floods or engulfed rivers have flowed, so that the remains of living beings which have peopled the district at more than one era may have subsequently been mingled in such caverns and confounded together in one and the same deposit. But the facts brought to light in 1858, during the systematic investigation of the Brixham cave, near Torquay in Devonshire, which will be described in the sequel, excited anew the curiosity of the British public and prepared the way for a general admission that scepticism in regard to the bearing of cave evidence in favour of the antiquity of Man had previously been pushed to an extreme.

Since that period many of the facts formerly adduced in favour of the co-existence in ancient times of Man with certain species of mammalia long since extinct have been re-examined in England and on the Continent, and new cases bearing on the same question, whether relating to caves or to alluvial strata in valleys, have been brought to light. To qualify myself for the appreciation and discussion of these cases, I have visited in the course of the last three years many parts of England, France, and Belgium, and have communicated personally or by letter with not a few of the geologists, English and foreign, who have taken part in these researches. Besides explaining in the present volume the results of this inquiry, I shall give a description of the glacial formations of Europe and North America, that I may allude to the theories entertained respecting their origin, and consider their probable relations in a chronological point of view to the human epoch, and why throughout a great part of the northern hemisphere they so often interpose an abrupt barrier to all attempts to trace farther back into the past the signs of the existence of Man upon the earth.

In the concluding chapters I shall offer a few remarks on the recent modifications of the Lamarckian theory of progressive development and transmutation, which are suggested by Mr. Darwin's work on the "Origin of Species by Variation and Natural Selection," and the bearing of this hypothesis on the different races of mankind and their connection with other parts of the animal kingdom.

NOMENCLATURE.

Some preliminary explanation of the nomenclature adopted in the following pages will be indispensable, that the meaning attached to the terms Recent, Pleistocene, and Post-Tertiary may be correctly understood. [Note 1.]

Previously to the year 1833, when I published the third volume of the "Principles of Geology," the strata called Tertiary had been divided by geologists into Lower, Middle, and Upper; the Lower comprising the oldest formations of the environs of Paris and London, with others of like age; the Middle, those of Bordeaux and Touraine; and the Upper, all that lay above or were newer than the last-mentioned group.

When engaged in 1828 in preparing for the press the treatise on geology above alluded to, I conceived the idea of classing the whole of this series of strata according to the different degrees of affinity which their fossil testacea bore to the living fauna. Having obtained information on this subject during my travels on the Continent, I learnt that M. Deshayes of Paris, already celebrated as a conchologist, had been led independently by the study of a large collection of Recent and fossil shells to very similar views respecting the possibility of arranging the Tertiary formations in chronological order, according to the proportional number of species of shells identical with living ones, which characterised each of the successive groups above mentioned. After comparing 3000 fossil species with 5000 living ones, the result arrived at was, that in the lower Tertiary strata there were about 3 1/2 per cent identical with Recent; in the middle Tertiary (the faluns of the Loire and Gironde), about 17 per cent; and in the upper tertiary, from 35 to 50, and sometimes in the most modern beds as much as 90 to 95 per cent.

For the sake of clearness and brevity, I proposed to give short technical names to these sets of strata, or the periods to which they respectively belonged. I called the first or oldest of them Eocene, the second Miocene, and the third Pliocene. The first of the above terms, Eocene, is derived from Greek eos, dawn, and Greek kainos, recent; because an extremely small proportion of the fossil shells of this period could be referred to living species, so that this era seemed to indicate the dawn of the present testaceous fauna, no living species of shells having been detected in the antecedent or Secondary rocks.

Some conchologists are now unwilling to allow that any Eocene species of shell has really survived to our times so unaltered as to allow of its specific identification with a living species. I cannot enter in this place into this wide controversy. It is enough at present to remark that the character of the Eocene fauna, as contrasted with that of the antecedent Secondary formations, wears a very modern aspect, and that some able living conchologists still maintain that there are Eocene shells not specifically distinguishable from those now extant; though they may be fewer in number than was supposed in 1833.

The term Miocene (from Greek meion, less; and Greek kainos, recent) is intended to express a minor proportion of Recent species (of testacea); the term Pliocene (from Greek pleion, more; and Greek kainos, recent), a comparative plurality of the same.

It has sometimes been objected to this nomenclature that certain species of infusoria found in the chalk are still existing, and, on the other hand, the Miocene and Older Pliocene deposits often contain the remains of mammalia, reptiles, and fish, exclusively of extinct species. But the reader must bear in mind that the terms Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene were originally invented with reference purely to conchological data, and in that sense have always been and are still used by me.

Since the first introduction of the terms above defined, the number of new living species of shells obtained from different parts of the globe has been exceedingly great, supplying fresh data for comparison, and enabling the palaeontologist to correct many erroneous identifications of fossil and Recent forms. New species also have been collected in abundance from Tertiary formations of every age, while newly discovered groups of strata have filled up gaps in the previously known series. Hence modifications and reforms have been called for in the classifications first proposed. The Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods have been made to comprehend certain sets of strata of which the fossils do not always conform strictly in the proportion of Recent to extinct species with the definitions first given by me, or which are implied in the etymology of those terms. These innovations have been treated of in my "Elements or Manual of Elementary Geology," and in the Supplement to the fifth edition of the same, published in 1859, where some modifications of my classification, as first proposed, are introduced; but I need not dwell on these on the present occasion, as the only formations with which we shall be concerned in the present volume are those of the most modern date, or the Post-Tertiary. It will be convenient to divide these into two groups, the Recent and the Pleistocene. In the Recent we may comprehend those deposits in which not only all the shells but all the fossil mammalia are of living species; in the Pleistocene those strata in which, the shells being Recent, a portion, and often a considerable one, of the accompanying fossil quadrupeds belongs to extinct species.

Cases will occur where it may be scarcely possible to draw the line of demarcation between the Newer Pliocene and Pleistocene, or between the latter and the recent deposits; and we must expect these difficulties to increase rather than diminish with every advance in our knowledge, and in proportion as gaps are filled up in the series of geological records.

The annexed tabular view (Table 1/1) of the whole series of fossiliferous strata will enable the reader to see at a glance the chronological relation of the Recent and Pleistocene to the antecedent periods. [Note 2.]

TABLE 1/1. STRATIFIED ROCKS.

KAINOZOIC OR TERTIARY: Pleistocene and Recent. Pliocene. Miocene. Oligocene. Eocene.

MESOZOIC OR SECONDARY: Cretaceous. Jurassic. Triassic.

PALAEOZOIC OR PRIMARY: Permian. Carboniferous. Devonian or old Red Sandstone. Silurian. Ordovician. Cambrian.

PRECAMBRIAN OR ARCHAEAN.

CHAPTER 2.

RECENT PERIOD—DANISH PEAT AND SHELL MOUNDS—SWISS LAKE-DWELLINGS.

(PLATE 1. A VILLAGE BUILT ON PILES IN A SWISS LAKE. Restored by Dr. F. Keller, partly from Dumont D'Urville's Sketch of similar habitations in New Guinea.)

Works of Art in Danish Peat-Mosses. Remains of three Periods of Vegetation in the Peat. Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Shell-Mounds or ancient Refuse-Heaps of the Danish Islands. Change in geographical Distribution of Marine Mollusca since their Origin. Embedded Remains of Mammalia of Recent Species. Human Skulls of the same Period. Swiss Lake-Dwellings built on Piles. Stone and Bronze Implements found in them. Fossil Cereals and other Plants. Remains of Mammalia, wild and domesticated. No extinct Species. Chronological Computations of the Date of the Bronze and Stone Periods in Switzerland. Lake-Dwellings, or artificial Islands called "Crannoges," in Ireland.

WORKS OF ART IN DANISH PEAT.

When treating in the "Principles of Geology" of the changes of the earth which have taken place in comparatively modern times, I have spoken of the embedding of organic bodies and human remains in peat, and explained under what conditions the growth of that vegetable substance is going on in northern and humid climates. Of late years, since I first alluded to the subject, more extensive investigations have been made into the history of the Danish peat-mosses. Of the results of these inquiries I shall give a brief abstract in the present chapter, that we may afterwards compare them with deposits of older date, which throw light on the antiquity of the human race.

The deposits of peat in Denmark,* varying in depth from 10 to 30 feet, have been formed in hollows or depressions in the northern drift or boulder formation hereafter to be described. (* An excellent account of these researches of Danish naturalists and antiquaries has been drawn up by an able Swiss geologist, M.A. Morlot, and will be found in the "Bulletin de la Societe Vaudoise des Sci. Nat." tome 6 Lausanne 1860.) The lowest stratum, 2 to 3 feet thick, consists of swamp-peat composed chiefly of moss or sphagnum, above which lies another growth of peat, not made up exclusively of aquatic or swamp plants. Around the borders of the bogs, and at various depths in them, lie trunks of trees, especially of the Scotch fir (Pinus sylvestris), often 3 feet in diameter, which must have grown on the margin of the peat-mosses, and have frequently fallen into them. This tree is not now, nor has ever been in historical times, a native of the Danish Islands, and when introduced there has not thriven; yet it was evidently indigenous in the human period, for Steenstrup has taken out with his own hands a flint instrument from below a buried trunk of one of these pines. It appears clear that the same Scotch fir was afterwards supplanted by the sessile variety of the common oak, of which many prostrate trunks occur in the peat at higher levels than the pines; and still higher the pedunculated variety of the same oak (Quercus robur, L.) occurs with the alder, birch (Betula verrucosa, Ehrh.), and hazel. The oak has now in its turn been almost superseded in Denmark by the common beech. Other trees, such as the white birch (Betula alba), characterise the lower part of the bogs, and disappear from the higher; while others again, like the aspen (Populus tremula), occur at all levels, and still flourish in Denmark. All the land and freshwater shells, and all the mammalia as well as the plants, whose remains occur buried in the Danish peat, are of Recent species. [Note 3.]

It has been stated, that a stone implement was found under a buried Scotch fir at a great depth in the peat. By collecting and studying a vast variety of such implements, and other articles of human workmanship preserved in peat and in sand-dunes on the coast, as also in certain shell-mounds of the aborigines presently to be described, the Danish and Swedish antiquaries and naturalists, MM. Nilsson, Steenstrup, Forchhammer, Thomsen, Worsaae, and others, have succeeded in establishing a chronological succession of periods, which they have called the ages of stone, of bronze, and of iron, named from the materials which have each in their turn served for the fabrication of implements.

The age of stone in Denmark coincided with the period of the first vegetation, or that of the Scotch fir, and in part at least with the second vegetation, or that of the oak. But a considerable portion of the oak epoch coincided with "the age of bronze," for swords and shields of that metal, now in the Museum of Copenhagen, have been taken out of peat in which oaks abound. The age of iron corresponded more nearly with that of the beech tree.* (* Morlot "Bulletin de la Societe Vaudoise des Sci. Nat." tome 6 page 292.) [Note 4.]

M. Morlot, to whom we are indebted for a masterly sketch of the recent progress of this new line of research, followed up with so much success in Scandinavia and Switzerland, observes that the introduction of the first tools made of bronze among a people previously ignorant of the use of metals, implies a great advance in the arts, for bronze is an alloy of about nine parts of copper and one of tin; and although the former metal, copper, is by no means rare, and is occasionally found pure or in a native state, tin is not only scarce but never occurs native. To detect the existence of this metal in its ore, then to disengage it from the matrix, and finally, after blending it in due proportion with copper, to cast the fused mixture in a mould, allowing time for it to acquire hardness by slow cooling, all this bespeaks no small sagacity and skilful manipulation. Accordingly, the pottery found associated with weapons of bronze is of a more ornamental and tasteful style than any which belongs to the age of stone. Some of the moulds in which the bronze instruments were cast, and "tags," as they are called, of bronze, which are formed in the hole through which the fused metal was poured, have been found. The number and variety of objects belonging to the age of bronze indicates its long duration, as does the progress in the arts implied by the rudeness of the earlier tools, often mere repetitions of those of the stone age, as contrasted with the more skilfully worked weapons of a later stage of the same period.

It has been suggested that an age of copper must always have intervened between that of stone and bronze; but if so, the interval seems to have been short in Europe, owing apparently to the territory occupied by the aboriginal inhabitants having been invaded and conquered by a people coming from the East, to whom the use of swords, spears, and other weapons of bronze was familiar. Hatchets, however, of copper have been found in the Danish peat.

The next stage of improvement, or that manifested by the substitution of iron for bronze, indicates another stride in the progress of the arts. Iron never presents itself, except in meteorites, in a native state, so that to recognise its ores, and then to separate the metal from its matrix, demands no inconsiderable exercise of the powers of observation and invention. To fuse the ore requires an intense heat, not to be obtained without artificial appliances, such as pipes inflated by the human breath, or bellows, or some other suitable machinery.

DANISH SHELL-MOUNDS, OR KJOKKENMODDING.*

(* Mr. John Lubbock published, after these sheets were written, an able paper on the Danish "Shell-mounds" in the October number of the "Natural History Review" 1861 page 489, in which he has described the results of a recent visit to Denmark, made by him in company with Mr. Busk.)

In addition to the peat-mosses, another class of memorials found in Denmark has thrown light on the pre-historical age. At certain points along the shores of nearly all the Danish islands, mounds may be seen, consisting chiefly of thousands of cast-away shells of the oyster, cockle, and other molluscs of the same species as those which are now eaten by Man. These shells are plentifully mixed up with the bones of various quadrupeds, birds, and fish, which served as the food of the rude hunters and fishers by whom the mounds were accumulated. I have seen similar large heaps of oysters, and other marine shells with interspersed stone implements, near the seashore, both in Massachusetts and in Georgia, U.S.A., left by the native North American Indians at points near to which they were in the habit of pitching their wigwams for centuries before the white man arrived.

Such accumulations are called by the Danes, Kjokkenmodding, or "kitchen-middens." Scattered all through them are flint knives, hatchets, and other instruments of stone, horn, wood, and bone, with fragments of coarse pottery, mixed with charcoal and cinders, but never any implements of bronze, still less of iron. The stone hatchets and knives had been sharpened by rubbing, and in this respect are one degree less rude than those of an older date, associated in France with the bones of extinct mammalia, of which more in the sequel. The mounds vary in height from 3 to 10 feet, and in area are some of them 1000 feet long, and from 150 to 200 wide. They are rarely placed more than 10 feet above the level of the sea, and are confined to its immediate neighbourhood, or if not (and there are cases where they are several miles from the shore), the distance is ascribable to the entrance of a small stream, which has deposited sediment, or to the growth of a peaty swamp, by which the land has been made to advance on the Baltic, as it is still doing in many places, aided, according to Puggaard, by a very slow upheaval of the whole country at the rate of 2 or 3 inches in a century.

There is also another geographical fact equally in favour of the antiquity of the mounds, namely, that they are wanting on those parts of the coast which border the Western Ocean, or exactly where the waves are now slowly eating away the land. There is every reason to presume that originally there were stations along the coast of the North Sea as well as that of the Baltic, but by the gradual undermining of the cliffs they have all been swept away.

Another striking proof, perhaps the most conclusive of all, that the "kitchen-middens" are very old, is derived from the character of their embedded shells. These consist entirely of living species; but, in the first place, the common eatable oyster is among them, attaining its full size, whereas the same Ostrea edulis cannot live at present in the brackish waters of the Baltic except near its entrance, where, whenever a north-westerly gale prevails, a current setting in from the ocean pours in a great body of salt water. Yet it seems that during the whole time of the accumulation of the "kitchen-middens" the oyster flourished in places from which it is now excluded. In like manner the eatable cockle, mussel, and periwinkle (Cardium edule, Mytilus edulis, and Littorina littorea), which are met with in great numbers in the "middens," are of the ordinary dimensions which they acquire in the ocean, whereas the same species now living in the adjoining parts of the Baltic only attain a third of their natural size, being stunted and dwarfed in their growth by the quantity of fresh water poured by rivers into that inland sea.* (* See "Principles of Geology" chapter 30.) Hence we may confidently infer that in the days of the aboriginal hunters and fishers, the ocean had freer access than now to the Baltic, communicating probably through the peninsula of Jutland, Jutland having been at no remote period an archipelago. Even in the course of the nineteenth century, the salt waters have made one irruption into the Baltic by the Lymfiord, although they have been now again excluded. It is also affirmed that other channels were open in historical times which are now silted up.* (* See Morlot "Bulletin de la Societe Vaudoise des Sci. Nat." tome 6.)

If we next turn to the remains of vertebrata preserved in the mounds, we find that here also, as in the Danish peat-mosses, all the quadrupeds belong to species known to have inhabited Europe within the memory of Man. No remains of the mammoth, or rhinoceros, or of any extinct species appear, except those of the wild bull (Bos urus, Linn., or Bos primigenius, Bojanus), which are in such numbers as to prove that the species was a favourite food of the ancient people. But as this animal was seen by Julius Caesar, and survived long after his time, its presence alone would not go far to prove the mounds to be of high antiquity. The Lithuanian aurochs or bison (Bos bison, L., Bos priscus, Boj.), which has escaped extirpation only because protected by the Russian Czars, surviving in one forest in Lithuania) has not yet been met with, but will no doubt be detected hereafter, as it has been already found in the Danish peat. The beaver, long since destroyed in Denmark, occurs frequently, as does the seal (Phoca Gryppus, Fab.), now very rare on the Danish coast. With these are mingled bones of the red deer and roe, but the reindeer has not yet been found. There are also the bones of many carnivora, such as the lynx, fox, and wolf, but no signs of any domesticated animals except the dog. The long bones of the larger mammalia have been all broken as if by some instrument, in such a manner as to allow of the extraction of the marrow, and the gristly parts have been gnawed off, as if by dogs, to whose agency is also attributed the almost entire absence of the bones of young birds and of the smaller bones and softer parts of the skeletons of birds in general, even of those of large size. In reference to the latter, it has been proved experimentally by Professor Steenstrup, that if the same species of birds are now given to dogs, they will devour those parts of the skeleton which are missing, and leave just those which are preserved in the old "kitchen-middens."

The dogs of the mounds, the only domesticated animals, are of a smaller race than those of the bronze period, as shown by the peat-mosses, and the dogs of the bronze age are inferior in size and strength to those of the iron age. The domestic ox, horse, and sheep, which are wanting in the mounds, are confined to that part of the Danish peat which was formed in the ages of bronze and iron.

Among the bones of birds, scarcely any are more frequent in the mounds than those of the auk (Alca impennis), now extinct. The Capercailzie (Tetrao urogallus) is also met with, and may, it is suggested, have fed on the buds of the Scotch fir in times when that tree flourished around the peat-bogs. The different stages of growth of the roedeer's horns, and the presence of the wild swan, now only a winter visitor, have been appealed to as proving that the aborigines resided in the same settlements all the year round. That they also ventured out to sea in canoes such as are now found in the peat-mosses, hollowed out of the trunk of a single tree, to catch fish far from land, is testified by the bony relics of several deep-sea species, such as the herring, cod, and flounder. The ancient people were not cannibals, for no human bones are mingled with the spoils of the chase. Skulls, however, have been obtained not only from peat, but from tumuli of the stone period believed to be contemporaneous with the mounds. These skulls are small and round, and have a prominent ridge over the orbits of the eyes, showing that the ancient race was of small stature, with round heads and overhanging eyebrows—in short, they bore a considerable resemblance to the modern Laplanders. The human skulls of the bronze age found in the Danish peat, and those of the iron period, are of an elongated form and larger size. There appear to be very few well-authenticated examples of crania referable to the bronze period—a circumstance no doubt attributable to the custom prevalent among the people of that era of burning their dead and collecting their bones in funeral urns.

No traces of grain of any sort have hitherto been discovered, nor any other indication that the ancient people had any knowledge of agriculture. The only vegetable remains in the mounds are burnt pieces of wood and some charred substance referred by Dr. Forchhammer to the Zostera marina, a sea plant which was perhaps used in the production of salt.

What may be the antiquity of the earliest human remains preserved in the Danish peat cannot be estimated in centuries with any approach to accuracy. In the first place, in going back to the bronze age, we already find ourselves beyond the reach of history or even of tradition. In the time of the Romans the Danish Isles were covered, as now, with magnificent beech forests. Nowhere in the world does this tree flourish more luxuriantly than in Denmark, and eighteen centuries seem to have done little or nothing towards modifying the character of the forest vegetation. Yet in the antecedent bronze period there were no beech trees, or at most but a few stragglers, the country being then covered with oak. In the age of stone again, the Scotch fir prevailed, and already there were human inhabitants in those old pine forests. How many generations of each species of tree flourished in succession before the pine was supplanted by the oak, and the oak by the beech, can be but vaguely conjectured, but the minimum of time required for the formation of so much peat must, according to the estimate of Steenstrup and other good authorities, have amounted to at least 4000 years; and there is nothing in the observed rate of the growth of peat opposed to the conclusion that the number of centuries may not have been four times as great, even though the signs of Man's existence have not yet been traced down to the lowest or amorphous stratum. As to the "kitchen-middens," they correspond in date to the older portion of the peaty record, or to the earliest part of the age of stone as known in Denmark.

ANCIENT SWISS LAKE-DWELLINGS, BUILT ON PILES.

In the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where there is a depth of no more than from 5 to 15 feet of water, ancient wooden piles are observed at the bottom sometimes worn down to the surface of the mud, sometimes projecting slightly above it. These have evidently once supported villages, nearly all of them of unknown date, but the most ancient of which certainly belonged to the age of stone, for hundreds of implements resembling those of the Danish shell-mounds and peat-mosses have been dredged up from the mud into which the piles were driven.

The earliest historical account of such habitations is that given by Herodotus of a Thracian tribe, who dwelt, in the year 520 B.C., in Prasias, a small mountain-lake of Paeonia, now part of modern Roumelia.* (* Herodotus lib. 5 cap. 16. Rediscovered by M. de Ville "Natural History Review" volume 2 1862 page 486.)

Their habitations were constructed on platforms raised above the lake, and resting on piles. They were connected with the shore by a narrow causeway of similar formation. Such platforms must have been of considerable extent, for the Paeonians lived there with their families and horses. Their food consisted largely of the fish which the lake produced in abundance.

In rude and unsettled times, such insular sites afforded safe retreats, all communication with the mainland being cut off, except by boats, or by such wooden bridges as could be easily removed.

The Swiss lake-dwellings seem first to have attracted attention during the dry winter of 1853-54, when the lakes and rivers sank lower than had ever been previously known, and when the inhabitants of Meilen, on the Lake of Zurich, resolved to raise the level of some ground and turn it into land, by throwing mud upon it obtained by dredging in the adjoining shallow water. During these dredging operations they discovered a number of wooden piles deeply driven into the bed of the lake, and among them a great many hammers, axes, celts, and other instruments. All these belonged to the stone period with two exceptions, namely, an armlet of thin brass wire, and a small bronze hatchet.

Fragments of rude pottery fashioned by the hand were abundant, also masses of charred wood, supposed to have formed parts of the platform on which the wooden cabins were built. Of this burnt timber, on this and other sites, subsequently explored, there was such an abundance as to lead to the conclusion that many of the settlements must have perished by fire. Herodotus has recorded that the Paeonians, above alluded to, preserved their independence during the Persian invasion, and defied the attacks of Darius by aid of the peculiar position of their dwellings. "But their safety," observes Mr. Wylie,* (* W.M. Wylie "Archaeologia" volume 38 1859, a valuable paper on the Swiss and Irish lake-habitations.) "was probably owing to their living in the middle of the lake, (Greek) en mese te limne, whereas the ancient Swiss settlers were compelled by the rapidly increasing depth of the water near the margins of their lakes to construct their habitations at a short distance from the shore, within easy bowshot of the land, and therefore not out of reach of fiery projectiles, against which thatched roofs and wooden walls could present but a poor defence." To these circumstances and to accidental fires we are probably indebted for the frequent preservation, in the mud around the site of the old settlements, of the most precious tools and works of art, such as would never have been thrown into the Danish "kitchen-middens," which have been aptly compared to a modern dusthole.

Dr. Ferdinand Keller of Zurich has drawn up a series of most instructive memoirs, illustrated with well-executed plates, of the treasures in stone, bronze, and bone brought to light in these subaqueous repositories, and has given an ideal restoration of part of one of the old villages (see Plate 1 above),* such as he conceives may have existed on the lakes of Zurich and Bienne. (* Keller "Pfahlbauten, Antiquarische Gesellschaft in Zurich" Bd. 12 and 13 1858-1861. In the fifth number of the "Natural History Review" January 9, 1862, Mr. Lubbock has published an excellent account of the works of the Swiss writers on their lake-habitations.) In this view, however, he has not simply trusted to his imagination, but has availed himself of a sketch published by M. Dumont d'Urville, of similar habitations of the Papuans in New Guinea in the Bay of Dorei. It is also stated by Dr. Keller, that on the River Limmat, near Zurich, so late as the last century, there were several fishing-huts constructed on this same plan.* (* Keller "Pfahlbauten, Antiquarische Gesellschaft in Zurich" Bd. 9 page 81 note.) It will be remarked that one of the cabins is represented as circular. That such was the form of many in Switzerland is inferred from the shape of pieces of clay which lined the interior, and which owe their preservation apparently to their having been hardened by fire when the village was burnt. In the sketch (Plate 1), some fishing-nets are seen spread out to dry on the wooden platform. The Swiss archaeologist has found abundant evidence of fishing-gear, consisting of pieces of cord, hooks, and stones used as weights. A canoe also is introduced, such as are occasionally met with. One of these, made of the trunk of a single tree, fifty feet long and three and a half feet wide, was found capsized at the bottom of the Lake of Bienne. It appears to have been laden with stones, such as were used to raise the foundation of some of the artificial islands.

It is believed that as many as 300 wooden huts were sometimes comprised in one settlement, and that they may have contained about 1000 inhabitants. At Wangen, M. Lohle has calculated that 40,000 piles were used, probably not all planted at one time nor by one generation. Among the works of great merit devoted specially to a description of the Swiss lake-habitations is that of M. Troyon, published in 1860.* (* "Sur les Habitations lacustres.") The number of sites which he and other authors have already enumerated in Switzerland is truly wonderful. They occur on the large lakes of Constance, Zurich, Geneva, and Neufchatel, and on most of the smaller ones. Some are exclusively of the stone age, others of the bronze period. Of these last more than twenty are spoken of on the Lake of Geneva alone, more than forty on that of Neufchatel, and twenty on the small Lake of Bienne.

One of the sites first studied by the Swiss antiquaries was the small lake of Moosseedorf, near Berne, where implements of stone, horn, and bone, but none of metal, were obtained. Although the flint here employed must have come from a distance (probably from the south of France), the chippings of the material are in such profusion as to imply that there was a manufactory of implements on the spot. Here also, as in several other settlements, hatchets and wedges of jade have been observed of a kind said not to occur in Switzerland or the adjoining parts of Europe, and which some mineralogists would fain derive from the East; amber also, which, it is supposed, was imported from the shores of the Baltic.

At Wangen near Stein, on the Lake of Constance, another of the most ancient of the lake-dwellings, hatchets of serpentine and greenstone, and arrow-heads of quartz have been met with. Here also remains of a kind of cloth, supposed to be of flax, not woven but plaited, have been detected. Professor Heer has recognised lumps of carbonised wheat, Triticum vulgare, and grains of another kind, T. dicoccum, and barley, Hordeum distichum, and flat round cakes of bread; and at Robbenhausen and elsewhere Hordeum hexastichum in fine ears, the same kind of barley which is found associated with Egyptian mummies, showing clearly that in the stone period the lake-dwellers cultivated all these cereals, besides having domesticated the dog, the ox, the sheep, and the goat.

Carbonised apples and pears of small size, such as still grow in the Swiss forests, stones of the wild plum, seeds of the raspberry and blackberry, and beech-nuts, also occur in the mud, and hazel-nuts in great plenty.

Near Morges, on the Lake of Geneva, a settlement of the bronze period, no less than forty hatchets of that metal have been dredged up, and in many other localities the number and variety of weapons and utensils discovered, in a fine state of preservation, is truly astonishing.

It is remarkable that as yet all the settlements of the bronze period are confined to Western and Central Switzerland. In the more eastern lakes those of the stone period alone have as yet been discovered.

The tools, ornaments, and pottery of the bronze period in Switzerland bear a close resemblance to those of corresponding age in Denmark, attesting the wide spread of a uniform civilisation over Central Europe at that era. In some few of the Swiss aquatic stations a mixture of bronze and iron implements has been observed, but no coins. At Tiefenau, near Berne, in ground supposed to have been a battle-field, coins and medals of bronze and silver, struck at Marseilles, and of Greek manufacture, and iron swords, have been found, all belonging to the first and pre-Roman division of the age of iron.

In the settlements of the bronze era the wooden piles are not so much decayed as those of the stone period; the latter having wasted down quite to the level of the mud, whereas the piles of the bronze age (as in the Lake of Bienne, for example) still project above it.

Professor Rutimeyer of Basle, well-known to palaeontologists as the author of several important memoirs on fossil vertebrata, has recently published a scientific description of great interest of the animal remains dredged up at various stations where they had been embedded for ages in the mud into which the piles were driven. * (* "Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz" Basel 1861.)

These bones bear the same relation to the primitive inhabitants of Switzerland and some of their immediate successors as do the contents of the Danish "kitchen-middens" to the ancient fishing and hunting tribes who lived on the shores of the Baltic.

The list of wild mammalia enumerated in this excellent treatise contains no less than twenty-four species, exclusive of several domesticated ones: besides which there are eighteen species of birds, the wild swan, goose, and two species of ducks being among them; also three reptiles, including the eatable frog and freshwater tortoise; and lastly, nine species of freshwater fish. All these (amounting to fifty-four species) are with one exception still living in Europe. The exception is the wild bull (Bos primigenius), which, as before stated, survived in historical times. The following are the mammalia alluded to:—The bear (Ursus arctos), the badger, the common marten, the polecat, the ermine, the weasel, the otter, wolf, fox, wild cat, hedgehog, squirrel, field-mouse (Mus sylvaticus), hare, beaver, hog (comprising two races, namely, the wild boar and swamp-hog), the stag (Cervus elaphus), the roe-deer, the fallow-deer, the elk, the steinbock (Capra ibex), the chamois, the Lithuanian bison, and the wild bull. The domesticated species comprise the dog, horse, ass, pig, goat, sheep, and several bovine races.

The greater number, if not all, of these animals served for food, and all the bones which contained marrow have been split open in the same way as the corresponding ones found in the shell-mounds of Denmark before mentioned. The bones both of the wild bull and the bison are invariably split in this manner. As a rule, the lower jaws with teeth occur in greater abundance than any other parts of the skeleton—a circumstance which, geologists know, holds good in regard to fossil mammalia of all periods. As yet the reindeer is missing in the Swiss lake-settlements as in the Danish "kitchen-middens," although this animal in more ancient times ranged over France, together with the mammoth, as far south as the Pyrenees.

A careful comparison of the bones from different sites has shown that in settlements such as Wangen and Moosseedorf, belonging to the earliest age of stone, when the habits of the hunter state predominated over those of the pastoral, venison, or the flesh of the stag and roe, was more eaten than the flesh of the domestic cattle and sheep. This was afterwards reversed in the later stone period and in the age of bronze. At that later period also the tame pig, which is wanting in some of the oldest stations, had replaced the wild boar as a common article of food. In the beginning of the age of stone, in Switzerland, the goats outnumbered the sheep, but towards the close of the same period the sheep were more abundant than the goats.

The fox in the first era was very common, but it nearly disappears in the bronze age, during which period a large hunting-dog, supposed to have been imported into Switzerland from some foreign country, becomes the chief representative of the canine genus.

A single fragment of the bone of a hare (Lepus timidus) has been found at Moosseedorf. The almost universal absence of this quadruped is supposed to imply that the Swiss lake-dwellers were prevented from eating that animal by the same superstition which now prevails among the Laplanders, and which Julius Caesar found in full force amongst the ancient Britons.* (* "Commentaries" lib 5 chapter 12.)

That the lake-dwellers should have fed so largely on the fox, while they abstained from touching the hare, establishes, says Rutimeyer, a singular contrast between their tastes and ours.

Even in the earliest settlements, as already hinted, several domesticated animals occur, namely, the ox, sheep, goat, and dog. Of the three last, each was represented by one race only; but there were two races of cattle, the most common being of small size, and called by Rutimeyer Bos brachyceros (Bos longifrons, Owen), or the marsh cow, the other derived from the wild bull; though, as no skull has yet been discovered, this identification is not so certain as could be wished. It is, however, beyond question that at a later era, namely, towards the close of the stone and beginning of the bronze period, the lake-dwellers had succeeded in taming that formidable brute the Bos primigenius, the Urus of Caesar, which he described as very fierce, swift, and strong, and scarcely inferior to the elephant in size. In a tame state its bones were somewhat less massive and heavy, and its horns were somewhat smaller than in wild individuals. Still in its domesticated form, it rivalled in dimensions the largest living cattle, those of Friesland, in North Holland, for example. When most abundant, as at Concise on the Lake of Neufchatel, it had nearly superseded the smaller race, Bos brachyceros, and was accompanied there for a short time by a third bovine variety, called Bos trochoceros, an Italian race, supposed to have been imported from the southern side of the Alps. (Caesar "Commentaries" lib 5 chapter 12.) This last-mentioned race, however, seems only to have lasted for a short time in Switzerland.

The wild bull (Bos primigenius) is supposed to have flourished for a while in a wild and tame state, just as now in Europe the domestic pig co-exists with the wild boar; and Rutimeyer agrees with Cuvier and Bell,* (* "British Quadrupeds" page 415.) in considering our larger domestic cattle of northern Europe as the descendants of this wild bull, an opinion which Owen disputes.* (* "British Fossil Mammal." page 500.)

In the later division of the stone period, there were two tame races of the pig, according to Rutimeyer; one large, and derived from the wild boar, the other smaller, called the "marsh-hog," or Sus scrofa palustris. It may be asked how the osteologist can distinguish the tame from the wild races of the same species by their skeletons alone. Among other characters, the diminished thickness of the bones and the comparative smallness of the ridges, which afford attachment to the muscles, are relied on; also the smaller dimensions of the tusks in the boar, and of the whole jaw and skull; and, in like manner, the diminished size of the horns of the bull and other modifications, which are the effects of a regular supply of food, and the absence of all necessity of exerting their activity and strength to obtain subsistence and defend themselves against their enemies.

A middle-sized race of dogs continued unaltered throughout the whole of the stone period; but the people of the bronze age possessed a larger hunting-dog, and with it a small horse, of which genus very few traces have been detected in the earlier settlements—a single tooth, for example, at Wangen, and only one or two bones at two or three other places.

In passing from the oldest to the most modern sites, the extirpation of the elk and beaver, and the gradual reduction in numbers of the bear, stag, roe, and freshwater tortoise are distinctly perceptible. The aurochs, or Lithuanian bison, appears to have died out in Switzerland about the time when weapons of bronze came into use. It is only in a few of the most modern lake-dwellings, such as Noville and Chavannes in the Canton de Vaud (which the antiquaries refer to the sixth century), that some traces are observable of the domestic cat, as well as of a sheep with crooked horns and with them bones of the domestic fowl.

After the sixth century, no extinction of any wild quadruped nor introduction of any tame one appears to have taken place, but the fauna was still modified by the wild species continuing to diminish in number and the tame ones to become more diversified by breeding and crossing, especially in the case of the dog, horse, and sheep. On the whole, however, the divergence of the domestic races from their aboriginal wild types, as exemplified at Wangen and Moosseedorf, is confined, according to Professor Rutimeyer, within narrow limits. As to the goat, it has remained nearly constant and true to its pristine form, and the small race of goat-horned sheep still lingers in some alpine valleys in the Upper Rhine; and in the same region a race of pigs, corresponding to the domesticated variety of Sus scrofa palustris, may still be seen.

Amidst all this profusion of animal remains extremely few bones of Man have been discovered; and only one skull, dredged up from Meilen, on the Lake of Zurich, of the early stone period, seems as yet to have been carefully examined. Respecting this specimen, Professor His observes that it exhibits, instead of the small and rounded form proper to the Danish peat-mosses, a type much more like that now prevailing in Switzerland, which is intermediate between the long-headed and short-headed form. (Rutimeyer "Die Fauna der Pfahlbauten in der Schweiz" page 181.)

So far, therefore, as we can draw safe conclusions from a single specimen, there has been no marked change of race in the human population of Switzerland during the periods above considered.

It is still a question whether any of these subaqueous repositories of ancient relics in Switzerland go back so far in time as the kitchen-middens of Denmark, for in these last there are no domesticated animals except the dog, and no signs of the cultivation of wheat or barley; whereas we have seen that, in one of the oldest of the Swiss settlements, at Wangen, no less than three cereals make their appearance, with four kinds of domestic animals. Yet there is no small risk of error in speculating on the relative claims to antiquity of such ancient tribes, for some of them may have remained isolated for ages and stationary in their habits, while others advanced and improved.

We know that nations, both before and after the introduction of metals, may continue in very different stages of civilisation, even after commercial intercourse has been established between them, and where they are separated by a less distance than that which divides the Alps from the Baltic.

The attempts of the Swiss geologists and archaeologists to estimate definitely in years the antiquity of the bronze and stone periods, although as yet confessedly imperfect, deserve notice, and appear to me to be full of promise. The most elaborate calculation is that made by M. Morlot, respecting the delta of the Tiniere, a torrent which flows into the Lake of Geneva near Villeneuve. This small delta, to which the stream is annually making additions, is composed of gravel and sand. Its shape is that of a flattened cone, and its internal structure has of late been laid open to view in a railway cutting 1000 feet long and 32 feet deep. The regularity of its structure throughout implies that it has been formed very gradually, and by the uniform action of the same causes. Three layers of vegetable soil, each of which must at one time have formed the surface of the cone, have been cut through at different depths. The first of these was traced over a surface of 15,000 square feet, having an average thickness of 5 inches, and being about 4 feet below the present surface of the cone. This upper layer belonged to the Roman period, and contained Roman tiles and a coin. The second layer, followed over a surface of 25,000 square feet, was 6 inches thick, and lay at a depth of 10 feet. In it were found fragments of unvarnished pottery and a pair of tweezers in bronze, indicating the bronze epoch. The third layer, followed for 35,000 square feet, was 6 or 7 inches thick and 19 feet deep. In it were fragments of rude pottery, pieces of charcoal, broken bones, and a human skeleton having a small, round and very thick skull. M. Morlot, assuming the Roman period to represent an antiquity of from sixteen to eighteen centuries, assigns to the bronze age a date of between 3000 and 4000 years, and to the oldest layer, that of the stone period, an age of from 5000 to 7000 years.

Another calculation has been made by M. Troyon to obtain the approximate date of the remains of an ancient settlement built on piles and preserved in a peat-bog at Chamblon, near Yverdun, on the Lake of Neufchatel. The site of the ancient Roman town of Eburodunum (Yverdun), once on the borders of the lake, and between which and the shore there now intervenes a zone of newly-gained dry land, 2500 feet in breadth, shows the rate at which the bed of the lake has been filled up with river sediment in fifteen centuries. Assuming the lake to have retreated at the same rate before the Roman period, the pile-works of Chamblon, which are of the bronze period, must be at the least 3300 years old.

For the third calculation, communicated to me by M. Morlot, we are indebted to M. Victor Gillieron, of Neuveville, on the Lake of Bienne. It relates to the age of a pile-dwelling, the mammalian bones of which are considered by M. Rutimeyer to indicate the earliest portion of the stone period of Switzerland, and to correspond in age with the settlement of Moosseedorf.

The piles in question occur at the Pont de Thiele, between the lakes of Bienne and Neufchatel. The old convent of St. Jean, founded 750 years ago, and built originally on the margin of the Lake of Bienne, is now at a considerable distance from the shore, and affords a measure of the rate of the gain of land in seven centuries and a half. Assuming that a similar rate of the conversion of water into marshy land prevailed antecedently, we should require an addition of sixty centuries for the growth of the morass intervening between the convent and the aquatic dwelling of Pont de Thiele, in all 6750 years. M. Morlot, after examining the ground, thinks it highly probable that the shape of the bottom on which the morass rests is uniform; but this important point has not yet been tested by boring. The result, if confirmed, would agree exceedingly well with the chronological computation before mentioned of the age of the stone period of Tiniere. As I have not myself visited Switzerland since these chronological speculations were first hazarded, I am unable to enter critically into a discussion of the objections which have been raised to the two first of them, or to decide on the merits of the explanations offered in reply.

IRISH LAKE-DWELLINGS OR CRANNOGES.

The lake-dwellings of the British isles, although not explored as yet with scientific zeal, as those of Switzerland have been in the last ten years, are yet known to be very numerous, and when carefully examined will not fail to throw great light on the history of the bronze and stone periods.

In the lakes of Ireland alone, no less than forty-six examples of artificial islands, called crannoges, have been discovered. They occur in Leitrim, Roscommon, Cavan, Down, Monaghan, Limerick, Meath, King's County, and Tyrone.* (* W.M. Wylie "Archaeologia" volume 38 1859 page 8.) One class of these "stockaded islands," as they have been sometimes called, was formed, according to Mr. Digby Wyatt, by placing horizontal oak beams at the bottom of the lake, into which oak posts, from 6 to 8 feet high, were mortised, and held together by cross beams, till a circular enclosure was obtained.

A space of 520 feet diameter, thus enclosed at Lagore, was divided into sundry timbered compartments, which were found filled up with mud or earth, from which were taken "vast quantities of the bones of oxen, swine, deer, goats, sheep, dogs, foxes, horses, and asses." All these were discovered beneath 16 feet of bog, and were used for manure; but specimens of them are said to be preserved in the museum of the Royal Irish Academy. From the same spot were obtained a great collection of antiquities, which, according to Lord Talbot de Malahide and Mr. Wylie, were referable to the ages of stone, bronze, and iron.* (* W.M. Wylie "Archaeologia" volume 38 1859 page 8, who cites "Archaeological Journal" volume 6 page 101.)

In Ardekillin Lake, in Roscommon, an islet of an oval form was observed, made of a layer of stones resting on logs of timber. Round this artificial islet or crannoge thus formed was a stone wall raised on oak piles. A careful description has been put on record by Captain Mudge, R.N., of a curious log-cabin discovered by him in 1833 in Drumkellin bog, in Donegal, at a depth of 14 feet from the surface. It was 12 feet square and 9 feet high, being divided into two stories each 4 feet high. The planking was of oak split with wedges of stone, one of which was found in the building. The roof was flat. A staked enclosure had been raised round the cabin, and remains of other similar huts adjoining were seen but not explored. A stone celt, found in the interior of the hut, and a piece of leather sandal, also an arrow-head of flint, and in the bog close at hand a wooden sword, give evidence of the remote antiquity of this building, which may be taken as a type of the early dwellings on the Crannoge islands.

"The whole structure," says Captain Mudge, "was wrought with the rudest kind of implements, and the labour bestowed on it must have been immense. The wood of the mortises was more bruised than cut, as if by a blunt stone chisel."* (* Mudge "Archaeologia" volume 26. ) Such a chisel lay on the floor of the hut, and by comparing it with the marks of the tool used in forming the mortises, they were found "to correspond exactly, even to the slight curved exterior of the chisel; but the logs had been hewn by a larger instrument, in the shape of an axe. On the floor of the dwelling lay a slab of freestone, 3 feet long and 14 inches thick, in the centre of which was a small pit three quarters of an inch deep, which had been chiselled out. This is presumed to have been used for holding nuts to be cracked by means of one of the round shingle stones, also found there, which had served as a hammer. Some entire hazel-nuts and a great quantity of broken shells were strewed about the floor."

The foundations of the house were made of fine sand, such as is found with shingle on the seashore about 2 miles distant. Below the layer of sand the bog or peat was ascertained, on probing it with an instrument, to be at least 15 feet thick. Although the interior of the building when discovered was full of "bog" or peaty matter, it seems when inhabited to have been surrounded by growing trees, some of the trunks and roots of which are still preserved in their natural position. The depth of overlying peat affords no safe criterion for calculating the age of the cabin or village, for I have shown in the "Principles of Geology" that both in England and Ireland, within historical times, bogs have burst and sent forth great volumes of black mud, which has been known to creep over the country at a slow pace, flowing somewhat at the rate of ordinary lava-currents, and sometimes overwhelming woods and cottages, and leaving a deposit upon them of bog-earth 15 feet thick.

None of these Irish lake-dwellings were built, like those of Helvetia, on platforms supported by piles deeply driven into the mud. "The Crannoge system of Ireland seems," says Mr. Wylie, "well nigh without a parallel in Swiss waters."

CHAPTER 3.

FOSSIL HUMAN REMAINS AND WORKS OF ART OF THE RECENT PERIOD—CONTINUED.

Delta and Alluvial Plain of the Nile. Burnt Bricks in Egypt before the Roman Era. Borings in 1851-54. Ancient Mounds of the Valley of the Ohio. Their Antiquity. Sepulchral Mound at Santos in Brazil. Delta of the Mississippi. Ancient Human Remains in Coral Reefs of Florida. Changes in Physical Geography in the Human Period. Buried Canoes in Marine Strata near Glasgow. Upheaval since the Roman Occupation of the Shores of the Firth of Forth. Fossil Whales near Stirling. Upraised Marine Strata of Sweden on Shores of the Baltic and the Ocean. Attempts to compute their Age.

DELTA AND ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE.

Some new facts of high interest illustrating the geology of the alluvial land of Egypt were brought to light between the years 1851 and 1854, in consequence of investigations suggested to the Royal Society by Mr. Leonard Horner, and which were partly carried out at the expense of the Society. The practical part of the undertaking was entrusted by Mr. Horner to an Armenian officer of engineers, Hekekyan Bey, who had for many years pursued his scientific studies in England, and was in every way highly qualified for the task.

It was soon found that to obtain the required information respecting the nature, depth, and contents of the Nile mud in various parts of the valley, a larger outlay was called for than had been originally contemplated. This expense the late viceroy, Abbas Pasha, munificently undertook to defray out of his treasury, and his successor, after his death, continued the operations with the same princely liberality.

Several engineers and a body of sixty workmen were employed under the superintendence of Hekekyan Bey, men inured to the climate and able to carry on the sinking of shafts and borings during the hot months, after the waters of the Nile had subsided, and in a season which would have been fatal to Europeans.

The results of chief importance arising out of this inquiry were obtained from two sets of shafts and borings sunk at intervals in lines crossing the great valley from east to west. One of these consisted of no fewer than fifty-one pits and artesian borings, made where the valley is 16 miles wide from side to side between the Arabian and Libyan deserts, in the latitude of Heliopolis, about 8 miles above the apex of the delta. The other line of borings and pits, twenty-seven in number, was in the parallel of Memphis, where the valley is only five miles broad.

Everywhere in these sections the sediment passed through was similar in composition to the ordinary Nile mud of the present day, except near the margin of the valley, where thin layers of quartzose sand, such as is sometimes blown from the adjacent desert by violent winds, were observed to alternate with the loam.

A remarkable absence of lamination and stratification was observed almost universally in the sediment brought up from all points except where the sandy layers above alluded to occurred. Mr. Horner attributes this want of all indication of successive deposition to the extreme thinness of the film of matter which is thrown down annually on the great alluvial plain during the season of inundation. The tenuity of this layer must indeed be extreme, if the French engineers are tolerably correct in their estimate of the amount of sediment formed in a century, which they suppose not to exceed on the average 5 inches. When the waters subside, this thin layer of new soil, exposed to a hot sun, dries rapidly, and clouds of dust are raised by the winds. The superficial deposit, moreover, is disturbed almost everywhere by agricultural labours, and even were this not the case, the action of worms, insects, and the roots of plants would suffice to confound together the deposits of two successive years.