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 archæologists 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 celt have been found there, showing that of the ground, and to match this combina- the metal had made its appearance in the tion we must look to other than New World village; and accordingly, while most of or South Sea Island tribes. Perhaps of all the piles had been rudely pointed with people whom we know of direct knowledge, stone hatchets, sometimes with the aid of the Guanches of the Canary Islands most fire, a very few were found which had been nearly represent the same stage of civilisa- cut with a metal hatchet. The difference tion; these islanders were found in the has been well described as like that befourteenth century making hatchets, knives, tween a well and a badly-cut lead pencil, lancets and spear-heads of obsidian, and and the effects of the increased facility axes of green jasper; keeping sheep, goats which the bronze hatchet gave in pile-makand pigs, hoeing their barleyfields with ing is seen at once by the Bronze-Age sticks pointed with goat's-horns; dressing villages being set in deeper water farther themselves in skins and woven cloth, sewing from the shore. Thus the piles of these 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. 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 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 When the Bronze Age had endured long tied fabrics, as compared with their elabo- enough for important settlements belonging rate specimens of real weaving, evidence to it to grow up in the lakes, it was in its of progress in the industrial arts during the turn followed by the Iron Age. Now we Stone Age. The loom which they used know very little of the political circumhas been reconstructed by a Zurich weav- stances under which the Bronze Age superer, and, strange to say, it proves all but seded the Stone Age anywhere, and in fact identical with that which has remained in only judge by circumstantial evidence that use in Iceland up to modern times. It such a change did take place in many dismay be even possible to judge from the tricts. But it happens that the introducweeds that it was from Mediterranean tion of the Iron Age in various countries is countries that the lake-men received their a matter of distinct history to us. We grain and flax; for the Cretan catchfly know well how with ruin and fire, with (Silene Cretica, L.) is a weed common in slaughter and captivity, with the utter subthe flax-fields of Greece, Italy, and Spain, version of old creeds and laws and culture, 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 results obtained by Professor Rutimeyer, of Basle, from a study of the animal remains, also indicate a progressing civilisation. In the early Stone Age, the aurochs or bison, and the urus or great fossil wild ox, which Cæsar spoke of as little smaller than an elephant, were very numerous. Foxes were more plentiful than dogs, and their broken bones show that, like the present Esquimaux, the lake-men ate them. But with the introduction of metal weapons, and no doubt in great measure in consequence of it, all game or wild animals, which in early ages far preponderated in number over the domestic animals, began to decline in a most marked manner, and became of second-rate importance.' Two See Tylor, Early History of Mankind,' p. 188, and in the proceedings of the Congress of Pre-historic Archæology at Norwich (1868). new civilisation, but of new civilisers. Such facts as these make us loth to throw aside altogether M. Troyon's theory of the history of his Swiss lake-tribes, that_the appearance of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age indicate the entrance of new and dominant races into the country. The early history of Europe is full of records of such invasions. Our own annals take in Romans, Saxons, Normans, at once as conquerors and as bearers of new civilisation; and the evidence is strong that the rude tribes of Lapland and Finland, and the Basques, of whom a remnant survives in the Pyrenees, represent early populations once spread more widely over Europe, but partly destroyed, partly assimilated, and 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 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 with their yet deadlier iron swords and spears. As to the lake dwellings themselves, we have seen how the last days of the lake towns of Meilen and Robenhausen correspond with the first appearance of bronze, just as the destruction of many a village fastness of modern savages corresponds with the first appearance of the white man in the land with his sword and musket. The distribution of the lake villages on the map changed remarkably while these things were happening. Distributed generally through the country in the early Stone Age, they became more restricted towards the Western Cantons in the Bronze Age; and at last in the Iron Age they dwindled in number to a mere remnant, mostly confined to the two lakes of Bienne and Neuchâtel. It is but a sequence to this course of things, that after lasting on in a few places up to times marked by the presence of Roman coins and pottery, they disappeared altogether, and at last were utterly forgotten. the iron which had just appeared. This, indeed, does look more like gradual development than the intrusion of foreigners with their ready-made implements. The way in which we find the remains of pilevillages in the lake of Geneva, each lying in the water in front of a modern town, is a striking proof of unbroken residence, as if the lake-dwellers, no longer finding enough advantage from their peculiar way of life to make it worth while to continue it, simply removed and built their wattled cottages on the shore. It is obvious, however, that when Dr. Keller thus takes the lakedwellers to have been Keltic tribes who began their Swiss life as Stone-Age men, he cannot hold the common opinion that the Kelts, with other Aryan tribes, were at least acquainted with bronze when they spread over Europe, and in fact he simply declares that this view is unfounded.' Now what is called the Aryan theory, which traces the migration of Kelts, Germans, 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 æs, æris, 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 tion among this population, as he judges of form of this world. If we can secure ourthem from the remains preserved in the selves against the possibility of later borlakes, Dr. Keller sees, not the record of rowing, we thus have a probability that successive invasions, but the general devel- copper was known before the ancestors of opment of culture among an industrious the Roman and the Teutonic stocks became and energetic people. Everywhere he dis- separated from the ancestors of the Hindus. cerns a continuity in the early Swiss history But this argument does not apply to the which thus comes before his eyes. He in- Kelts, whose separation from the parent sists on the significant fact that on the in-stock is held, on philological grounds, to 526 adding up generations and years and days, in such computations as that printed in the margin of our Bibles, can scarcely be regarded as limiting the age of the savages of Brixham and St. Acheul, when they would not be put in evidence against the high antiquity of the mammoths among whom these men lived. And however great may be the merit and use of calculations based on the Bible, they carry upon their face the confession of their indefiniteness, and obviously cannot be taken as binding upon men's faith. have been very early; so that it lies open, interest to all intelligent persons, gained a even to the strongest upholders of the Ary-special attention from being looked upon as an theory, to hold at the same time that the hostile to Christianity by a large public who Keltic tribes were Stone-Age men like the accordingly either feared them, or someearly settlers of Robenhausen, if they were times triumphed in them. But those theonot those settlers themselves.* Had human logians who most thoroughly understand the remains been found in numbers in the lake bearings of the case see at once the uncharsettlements, they might have given impor- itableness and the injustice of bringing tant help in deciding the race of their against such enquiries the imputation of builders but, strange to say, they have heresy. Dates arrived at by the process of been so seldom discovered, that some halfdozen skulls, not shown to be different from those of the present inhabitants of the country, are the miserably insufficient evidence to be laid before the craniologists. Their burial places have not been traced. We do not even know what they did with their dead; and so, perhaps, miss what we might have learnt from their tombs as to their ideas of a world beyond the grave. As for their religion in general, we find no idols, no temples, no altars, though Dr. Keller, indeed, founds a theory on certain ornamented, crescent-like objects of sandstone or earthenware, found in settlements of the Bronze Age both in the lakes and on the mainland. These he looks upon as images indicating a prevalent moon-worship; but we cannot follow him in his conjectures as to the meaning of these curious objects, and much less use them to connect their makers with Keltic races through an unproved Druidical moon-cultus. Such is in outline the problem as to the nationality of the Swiss lake-tribes, upon which our readers will scarcely wonder that we abstain from offering a decision of our own. cause our minds are open to admit, upon It by no means follows, however, that beany sufficient evidence, a very ancient date for man's appearance in history, we should therefore take the present vague calculations of twenty or fifty or a hundred thousand years, as being of the nature of scientific facts. We shall do well, instead of straining at possible thousands in this misty chronicle, to hold to the fewest hundreds that will answer the exigencies of the case. And thus, when we find the Swiss lakedwellers brought in as part of the evidence A very few years ago, in fact since the are in three of the works now before us, bearing on the antiquity of man, as they discovery of the Swiss lake dwellings, evi- we must look narrowly and grudgingly at dence was prominently brought forward in the estimates of their age. No enormous England to prove that the antiquity of man antiquity is indeed claimed for them, but on the earth far transcended the common they form, in the treatises of Sir Charles estimate of six or seven thousand years, Lyell, Sir John Lubbock, and Mons. Le secing that tribes of men making and using Hon, a stepping-stone, as it were, in chrovery rude stone implements were already nology to the yet more ancient tribes of the living in the time of the extinct quaternary drift gravels and the Dordogne caves. animals. Since then the enquiry has been direct means of calculating their age, there taken up with great vigour, and the search are brought forward three geological arguin gravel beds and limestone caverns has ments. at any rate placed it beyond doubt that sav- based on a railway section through a conical The first is Herr Von Morlot's, age tribes of men inhabited Europe while accumulation of gravel and alluvium, which the mammoth, the tichorine rhinoceros, the the torrent of the Tinière has gradually cave-bear and the cave-hyæna, were still built up where it enters the Lake of Geneva surviving in the land. Various attempts near Villeneuve. This cone is remarkably have been made to calculate the age of this regular in its structure, and in it there ocperiod of early human history, and loose as cur three sheets or layers of vegetable soil these estimates have been, it seems at any of great extent, each of which must at one rate to have been very remote. These in-time have formed the surface of the cone. vestigations, however, beside their inherent *See Pictet: 'Origines Indo-Europénnes.' Part I., p. 161. &c. Max Muller: Lectures. 2nd Series, p. 229, &c. As The first is about 4 feet below the present confessedly imperfect, yet full of promise, and Sir John Lubbock insists with reason on the value of estimates, however crude, if while founded on different data they yet in the main agree in one result. 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 skull. Allowing for certain disturbing influences, Herr von Morlot reckons, as we may roughly put it, about fourteen centuries for the accumulation of 4 feet between Roman 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 a lake settlement indicate the former pres-cending far beyond the Pharaohs." ence of open water, but his ingenious argument requires more than one supposition by no means easy to verify. M. Troyon calculates in a similar way the date of the lake settlement of which the piles were found in a peat bog at Chamblon, near Yverdun. This old Roman town, Eburodunum, was once on the borders of the Lake of Neuchâtel, but 2500 feet of new ground now intervenes, and if the lake retreated at the same rate before Roman times, the Bronze ages asWe suppose few chronologers would give to the pyramids of Egypt an antiquity of less than 2000 years B.C. The Swiss lake dwellings, for all we can prove to the contrary, may be as old as this, or even older; but mere possibilities go for little in such matters, and as yet we have met with nothing like an absolute convincing proof that the first lakeman drove his first rudely-pointed fir stem in the Swiss waters fifteen hundred, or even a thousand years before the Christian era. Behold thy darling, which thy lustful care 6 Quarles's two other works of the same kind, the 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 compliance with the wish of Prof. Child, of in the Pia Desdieria' of Hermann Hugues, or Harvard, that some ballads from manuscripts Hugo (born at Brussels, 1588; died 1629), who be included in the first year's issue of the Balwas, for his length of life, a voluminous writer; lad Society, Mr. Furnivall will edit this year the he was a Jesuit. His first edition was, we be- first part of a volume of Ballads from Manulieve, in 1624; the ninth in 1676. Every one of scripts.' This part will consist chiefly, if not the plates has a Latin poem, followed by ap- wholly, of political ballads of Henry the Eighth's posite quotations. Quarles (1592-1644) pub-time; and, as they do not bear out Mr. Froude's lished 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, and in Quarles, 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. |