wooden backing by which it was held. We their war-clubs, pointed their spears and know to what immense distances the Indians arrows with the same mineral, and even of North America carried their red pipe- had themselves shaved with beautifully regstone, how the shells of the great tropical ular flakes of it, such as may now be seen Pyrula perversa were conveyed two thous- in our museums looking like fluted strips sand miles to Lake Superior, how even in of bottle-glass. But though using these Australia the special products of each district, savage instruments, the ancient Mexicans pipe-clay and red ochre, drinking cups and had learnt, we have no idea how, to make cockatoo's feathers, and especially a much that alloy of copper and tin which we call esteemed kind of flint from the North,' are bronze. Of this they made their hatchetconveyed by barter from tribe to tribe on blades in such quantities that Bernal Diaz the vast continent.* Thus it need not in and his companions, thinking that the the least surprise us that the lake-dwellers bright metal was gold, set to bartering seem to have got their best flint from France coloured beads with the natives for them, or Germany; but it is more remarkable that and in three days got six hundred before celts of the beautiful green stone known as they found out their mistake. The Mexinephrite seem to have been brought to them cans had in fact entered what archeologists from the East. With bows and arrows, call the Bronze Age, and at a certain periclubs and javelins, they killed the bear, the od of their history the Swiss lake-tribes wolf, the aurochs or bison, and the now did the same. Of course they must have extinct urus (Bos primigenius); and they obtained not only their knowledge of the hunted stags, wild boars, beavers, and metal but the metal itself from abroad, but smaller animals, in such vast numbers that they melted it in their own foundries, of game must have been a main item of their which there was, for instance, a considerafood. Like the New Zealanders and many ble one at Morges. The copper and the other modern savages, the lake-dwellers tin have been found separate, and there were agriculturists, and their rude instru- occur crucibles with remains of metal, ments of stick or stag's horn are savage moulds for casting celts, and bad castings enough. They cultivated wheat and barley, broken up for old metal. The possession and we still find the grain in heaps, as well of bronze at once began to make a differas the sandstone slabs and pounders with ence in the settlements. This is curiously which it was crushed into meal, the flat to be traced at Meilen, which almost exstones on which the dough was baked, and clusively belongs to the stone period, but even the very cakes of bread themselves. a bronze bracelet and a single bronze But they were herdsmen as well as tillers of the ground, and to match this combination we must look to other than New World or South Sea Island tribes. Perhaps of all people whom we know of direct knowledge, the Guanches of the Canary Islands most nearly represent the same stage of civilisation; these islanders were found in the fourteenth century making hatchets, knives, lancets and spear-heads of obsidian, and axes of green jasper; keeping sheep, goats and pigs, hoeing their barleyfields with sticks pointed with goat's-horns; dressing themselves in skins and woven cloth, sewing their sinew-thread with needles of bone, making mats and earthen cooking-pots, catching their fish with hooks of horn and nets of rush. Such was the early condition of the Swiss lake-tribes.

When, in the sixteenth century, the Spanish invaders first made their way to Mexico, they found that the builders of that wonderful city, skilful as they were in the industrial arts, yet used stone hatchets, cemented rows of sharp obsidian teeth into

A. J. Oldfield, The Aborigines of Australia,' in Transactions of the Ethnological Society,' vol. iii. (1865) p. 269.

celt have been found there, showing that the metal had made its appearance in the village; and accordingly, while most of the piles had been rudely pointed with stone hatchets, sometimes with the aid of fire, a very few were found which had been cut with a metal hatchet. The difference has been well described as like that between a well and a badly-cut lead pencil, and the effects of the increased facility which the bronze hatchet gave in pile-making is seen at once by the Bronze-Age villages being set in deeper water farther from the shore. Thus the piles of these later villages are much more extensively to be seen still under water, in the Lake of Geneva and elsewhere, than the earlier Stone-Age ones; they have not only been left fewer centuries to decay, but their stumps have remained undisturbed in deep water below where the fiercest tempest can reach them,

That most able botanist, Professor Oswald Heer, of Zürich, has studied the vegetable remains found in the lake villages with remarkable results. He has shown, for instance, that the inhabitants lived there both in summer and winter, for the

When the Bronze Age had endured long enough for important settlements belonging to it to grow up in the lakes, it was in its turn followed by the Iron Age. Now we know very little of the political circumstances under which the Bronze Age superseded the Stone Age anywhere, and in fact only judge by circumstantial evidence that such a change did take place in many districts. But it happens that the introduction of the Iron Age in various countries is a matter of distinet history to us. We know well how with ruin and fire, with slaughter and captivity, with the utter subversion of old creeds and laws and culture,

cherries, whose stones remain, must have races of wild hogs were known in the been ripe in June, the raspberries and Stone Age, but when we come to the blackberries far on in summer, while the Bronze Age we find our domestic pig. To sloes and hips did not become eatable complete this picture of a general advance till winter began, and the stores of hazel- of civilisation, it is to be observed that nuts and beech-nuts might last yet later. with the introduction of bronze came into Even in the early Stone Age, they culti-use instruments hitherto unknown, such, vated several kinds of grain, the six-rowed for instance, as the sickle and the sword, barley, various kinds of wheat, including while, the general average of art moving the Egyptian variety, and two kinds of onward, the clumsy terra cotta vessels of millet; while flax was largely grown and the Stone Age gave place to earthenware plaited, tied and woven with surprising of far higher quality and ornamentation. skill, and we seem to find in their primitive tied fabrics, as compared with their elaborate specimens of real weaving, evidence of progress in the industrial arts during the Stone Age. The loom which they used has been reconstructed by a Zurich weaver, and, strange to say, it proves all but identical with that which has remained in use in Iceland up to modern times.* It may be even possible to judge from the weeds that it was from Mediterranean countries that the lake-men received their grain and flax; for the Cretan catchfly (Silene Cretica, L.) is a weed common in the flax-fields of Greece, Italy, and Spain, and it appears in the Swiss lake-dwellings, the Spaniards carried the Iron Age in upon though it is not found living in Switzer- the Bronze Age of Mexico and Peru. In land or Germany; and the presence of an- the seventeenth century the rude natives of other plant, the corn blue-bottle (Centaurea Kamschatka were still in the Stone Age, cyanus), of which the original home seems painfully scooping out their canoes and to be Sicily, tells a similar tale. This cooking-troughs with implements of stone; evidence, if trustworthy, would seem to and historians can tell us that it was no show intercourse between the Swiss lake- gentle wave of advancing civilisation that men and peoples of Southern Europe; broke upon them when the Cossack invathese latter being also in the Stone Age, ders carried their iron and their arts among or why should they not have transmitted them. And thus with the savages of Amertheir metal as well as their plants? Dur-ica and the Pacific, the transition from ing the Bronze Age new importations took stone to iron has been in general accomplace, and there appear for the first time panied by the violent entrance, not only of oats, spelt, and a dwarf field-bean. The new civilisation, but of new civilisers. results obtained by Professor Rutimeyer, Such facts as these make us loth to throw of Basle, from a study of the animal re- aside altogether M. Troyon's theory of the mains, also indicate a progressing civilisa- history of his Swiss lake-tribes, that the tion. In the early Stone Age, the aurochs appearance of the Bronze Age and the Iron or bison, and the urus or great fossil wild Age indicate the entrance of new and domox, which Cæsar spoke of as little smaller inant races into the country. The early than an elephant, were very numerous. history of Europe is full of records of such Foxes were more plentiful than dogs, and invasions. Our own annals take in Rotheir broken bones show that, like the mans, Saxons, Normans, at once as conpresent Esquimaux, the lake-men ate them. querors and as bearers of new civilisation; But with the introduction of metal weap- and the evidence is strong that the rude ons, and no doubt in great measure in con- tribes of Lapland and Finland, and the sequence of it, all game or wild animals, Basques, of whom a remnant survives in which in early ages far preponderated in the Pyrenees, represent early populations number over the domestic animals, began once spread more widely over Europe, but to decline in a most marked manner, and partly destroyed, partly assimilated, and became of second-rate importance.' Two partly driven into outlying regions of the north and west, by invaders who took possession of their lands. But M. Troyon steps on ground not firm enough for us to

6

See Tylor, Early History of Mankind,' p. 188, and in the proceedings of the Congress of Pre-historic Archæology at Norwich (1868).

tread when he lays out methodically the his- | troduction of bronze the natives began to tory of an original Stone-Age population, copy their old stone weapons in the new invaded by conquering Keltic tribes with material, while in later times there are their weapons of bronze, followed at a later cases of the bronze types being copied in time by the Helvetii pouring into the land the iron which had just appeared. This, with their yet deadlier iron swords and indeed, does look more like gradual develspears. As to the lake dwellings them-opment than the intrusion of foreigners selves, we have seen how the last days of with their ready-made implements. The the lake towns of Meilen and Robenhausen way in which we find the remains of pilecorrespond with the first appearance of villages in the lake of Geneva, each lying bronze, just as the destruction of many a in the water in front of a modern town, is a village fastness of modern savages corre- striking proof of unbroken residence, as if sponds with the first appearance of the white the lake-dwellers, no longer finding enough man in the land with his sword and musket. advantage from their peculiar way of life The distribution of the lake villages on the to make it worth while to continue it, simmap changed remarkably while these things ply removed and built their wattled cotwere happening. Distributed generally tages on the shore. It is obvious, however, through the country in the early Stone Age, that when Dr. Keller thus takes the lakethey became more restricted towards the dwellers to have been Keltic tribes who beWestern Cantons in the Bronze Age; and gan their Swiss life as Stone-Age men, he at last in the Iron Age they dwindled in cannot hold the common opinion that the number to a mere remnant, mostly confined Kelts, with other Aryan tribes, were at to the two lakes of Bienne and Neuchâtel. least acquainted with bronze when they It is but a sequence to this course of things, spread over Europe, and in fact he simply that after lasting on in a few places up to declares that this view is unfounded.' times marked by the presence of Roman Now what is called the Aryan theory, coins and pottery, they disappeared alto- which traces the migration of Kelts, Gergether, and at last were utterly forgotten. mans, Greeks, Romans, and Slaves from The Romans certainly were in Switzer- Asia into Europe, rests mainly on philologland and left their traces there, discernible ical evidence; and in spite of the common enough even now; and very likely they fol- opinion that the whole Aryan race before lowed earlier streams of invading immi-its separation was already in the Bronze grants. But we cannot with any safety re- Age, we cannot see that this is based on construct these early chronicles by inspec- substantial proof. Dr. Keller's countrytion of the stone and metal implements of man, Professor Adolphe Pictet, endeavours the lake-dwellers. Of such pre-Roman in- to prove that his early Aryans were acvaders Dr. Keller, indeed, will not hear a quainted even with iron; but few ethnoword. Refusing to admit evidence of gen- graphers would accept the ingenious but eral change of population, he argues that far-fetched comparisons and etymologies the Keltic tribes who occupied the country on which he grounds his claim. For the when we first hear of it in Roman history opinion that the ancient Aryans were a were the very people who lived, some on Bronze-Age people, maintained by more the lakes, but no doubt most in ordinary cautious reasoners, such as Professor Alvillages on dry land. The plough must brecht Weber of Berlin and Professor Max have broken up the site of many an ancient Müller of Oxford, a better case may be settlement on land, and new towns must made out, but it cannot be considered as cover the place of many others; but there conclusive. Let us grant, with the latter still remain convincing proofs in the ruins philologist, that Latin as, aris, Gothic ais, of old villages, such as that of Ebersberg Old German ér, Anglo-Saxon âr, English near the Schaffhausen falls, that the Bronze- ore, are all forms of one original word, Age people who lived on the lakes were which meant copper, pure or alloyed into part and parcel of the general inhabitants bronze; and let us admit the Sanskrit ayas, of the country. In the advance of civilisa-metal,' as representing the early Aryan form of this world. If we can secure ourselves against the possibility of later borrowing, we thus have a probability that copper was known before the ancestors of the Roman and the Teutonic stocks became separated from the ancestors of the Hindus. But this argument does not apply to the Kelts, whose separation from the parent sists on the significant fact that on the in-stock is held, on philological grounds, to

tion among this population, as he judges of them from the remains preserved in the lakes, Dr. Keller sees, not the record of successive invasions, but the general development of culture among an industrious and energetic people. Everywhere he discerns a continuity in the early Swiss history which thus comes before his eyes. He in

zers, relics of the bronze age; the third, | Age lake settlement of Chamblon would be 19 feet down, yielded rude pottery, char- some 3300 years old. Such calculations as coal, some broken bones, and a human skel- these are, Sir Charles Lyell holds, though eton with a small, round, and very thick confessedly imperfect, yet full of promise, skull. Allowing for certain disturbing in- and Sir John Lubbock insists with reason fluences, Herr von Morlot reckons, as we on the value of estimates, however crude, may roughly put it, about fourteen centuries if while founded on different data they yet for the accumulation of 4 feet between Ro- in the main agree in one result. man times and our own, and thence reckons If we look at the lake remains themselves, at the same rate of 1 foot to three and a and guess how long it must have taken for half centuries, back to about 3500 years for such large and numerous settlements to the age of bronze, and to about 6500 years have grown up in the Stone Age, before the to the age of stone. We fail, however, to new series of towns belonging to the ages see that an accumulation of gravel, which of bronze and iron, it seems necessary to was so interrupted and varying that six-inch date their first foundation in Switzerland layers of vegetable mould could be from several centuries before the Christian era. time to time formed upon it, can be taken But this general impression of length of with any confidence, as a regular measure time does not readily shape itself into a disof the lapse of years. Again, M. Gilliéron tinct chronology. If we are to make a stand calculates a minimum of 6750 years, re- anywhere, we will make it in a protest quired for the silting up of the valley of the against such point-blank assertions as that Thiele, from the point where the remains of the Swiss lake villages belong to ages asa lake settlement indicate the former pres-cending far beyond the Pharaohs." We ence of open water, but his ingenious argu- suppose few chronologers would give to the ment requires more than one supposition by pyramids of Egypt an antiquity of less than no means easy to verify. M. Troyon calcu- 2000 years B.C. The Swiss lake dwellings, lates in a similar way the date of the lake for all we can prove to the contrary, may settlement of which the piles were found in be as old as this, or even older; but mere a peat bog at Chamblon, near Yverdun. possibilities go for little in such matters, This old Roman town, Eburodunum, was and as yet we have met with nothing like an once on the borders of the Lake of Neu- absolute convincing proof that the first lakechâtel, but 2500 feet of new ground now man drove his first rudely-pointed fir stem intervenes, and if the lake retreated at the in the Swiss waters fifteen hundred, or even same rate before Roman times, the Bronze-a thousand years before the Christian era.

VERY many remember Quarles's 'Emblems,' and the amusement with which they looked on the quaint old pictures, the Soul locked up in the ribs of a skeleton death, and, again, rising from her bed in search of her spiritual spouse, who has slily hidden behind the curtains, from which his head peeps out with its rays of glory. But many are not aware that the plates and the plan are borrowed the life of Quarles in the Biogr. Brit., the last edition of the Emblems' (1845), the life in the Penny Cyclopædia, give no hint of it. These plates, which are faithfully copied down to our day, are all found, as like as life, in the Pia Desdieria' of Hermann Hugues, or Hugo (born at Brussels, 1588; died 1629), who was, for his length of life, a voluminous writer; he was a Jesuit. His first edition was, we believe, in 1624; the ninth in 1676. Every one of the plates has a Latin poem, followed by apposite quotations. Quarles (1592-1644) published the first edition of his Emblems' in 1635. His poems are neither translations nor imitations of those of Hugo: thus the skeleton-locked soul begins in Hugo,

Infelix! ubi nunc bona tot quæ perdita plango,
Sed frustra, planctu non revocanda meo;

and in Quarles,

Behold thy darling, which thy lustful care
Pampers, for which thy restless thoughts prepare
Such early cares.

·

Quarles's two other works of the same kind, the
School of the Heart' and Hieroglyphics of the
Life of Man,' are poor imitations as to the plates,
though Quarles is himself in the poetical part.

Athenæum.

6

IN compliance with the wish of Prof. Child, of Harvard, that some ballads from manuscripts be included in the first year's issue of the Ballad Society, Mr. Furnivall will edit this year the first part of a volume of Ballads from Manuscripts.' This part will consist chiefly, if not wholly, of political ballads of Henry the Eighth's time; and, as they do not bear out Mr. Froude's favourable estimate of the social condition of England at that period, some evidence on the point will be collected by the editor. One very curious paper, pointed out by Prof. Brewer, will be printed-the proceedings in a trial to establish a Duchess's right to the services of two of her bondmen, in 1527.

Athenæum.