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'And now, after enumerating the different branches of industry which characterised the life of these lacustrine races, it may be not out of place to remark that the inhabitant of the village had also his pleasures and amusements. The stone quoits found in the lakes resemble those which the North American Indians still employ in their sports. A people of huntsmen must have found pleasure in the handling of weapons, and in rivalries of skill and dexterity in hitting the mark, throwing the javelin, the race and the wrestle. Living on the lakes, they must have frequently made it an amusement to manage the oar, or to cleave the waters in swimming matches. The children of the tribe, like the dwellers on the shores of our lakes at the present day, played on the surface of the water, or plunged into it from their platforms. Again, when we see how proud these people were of adorning themselves with rings passed round all their limbs, with long pins, small chains, pendents, and even rattles, it may be safely concluded that they were not less attached to amusements and fêtes. The dances which formed part of their religious rites had not assuredly a character exclusively devotional; and we may suppose that their recreations and sports were such as they still are among tribes which have not got beyond the extent of progress attained by the ancient Gauls. The inhabitants of the villages, dispersed from the labours of the day, returned at night to seek repose in their dwellings; but, after their labours, the breeze of evening, in the soft moonlight, invited them to assemble on the platform, where their gaiety was not inferior to that of a modern village eve. . . . . During the stormy season, the dwelling, shaken by every blast of wind, afforded at times but little security. The angry waves rolled loudly under the frail hut, plunged in a profound obscurity only broken by the flashes of lightning. Who can say whether the electric fire did not occasionally consume the lacustrine hamlet? and how can we represent to ourselves the confusion of an entire population endeavouring to save its aged and children, and leaping into the waves to swim to the shore which some were unable to reach? And often must these disastrous scenes have assumed other shapes the whistle of the wind, the howl of wolves, the melancholy shriek of the birds of night, must have excited the timid imagination of a credulous race, inclined to the marvellous, until it found vent for superstition, innate in every heart. Then the family circle would draw closer, and talk over the mysteries of the supernatural world.' (Troyon, pp. 376-80.)

To trace the historical course and geographical bearings of the revolutions and migrations which established each successive stage on the ruins of the others may seem a hopeless task; it is at all events far beyond our present means of execution. One remarkable circumstance, however, is thought by the Swiss antiquaries to be established; that is, unless subsequent discoveries chance to upset it, as has been the case with so many similar generalisations. The relics of the age of bronze, mingled with that of stone, are found in Western Switzerland only

In Eastern

the lakes of Geneva, Neufchatel, and so forth. Switzerland (Lakes of Constance, Zurich, Moosseedorf, &c.) the villages as yet discovered are all of the unmixed period of stone. And, singularly enough-possibly, indeed, through some chain of cause and effect as yet unknown, and not by mere coincidence the boundary between these two classes of villages seem exactly to coincide with that which divides the French from the German population of modern Switzerland. The conjectural explanation is this: that the immigration of the men of bronze took place from the Mediterranean up the valley of the Rhone, and through the broad gate of Lake Leman; that they stopped short, eastward, in their occupation of the Alpine land at this point; not in their conquest of it, for the stone age Pfahlbauten east of this line show the same signs of violent destruction as those to the west.

Can we form any conjecture as to the family and origin of these men of bronze, the intermediate race between the primitive and the modern? We have at the outset of this article noticed Worsaae's opinion on the subject; at least, what he advanced, with hesitation, in 1847, when these inquiries were in their infancy. It seems to have been the fashion among Swiss antiquarians to term them Celts, and thus to recognise a prior Celtic invasion of bronze, and a posterior Celto-Germanic, or Cymric, or Helvetian of iron. But M. Troyon confesses, as it seems to us with much reason, that he is not satisfied with this ordinary doctrine:

'I have adopted,' he says (p. 419.), 'the general denomination of Celts for the European population of the age of bronze. I admit, nevertheless, that the question may be raised, whether the Celts did not in truth arrive in the West at the epoch of the first age of iron.'

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He then shows, what is perfectly true, that the Celts, at the earliest period at which history speaks of them, were acquainted with the use of gold, copper, and silver, as well as iron. It may be added that the small and delicate figures of this bronze race present no analogy to those of the sturdy Celtic breed. It seems safest, as we have already stated, to suppose both the first races equally pre-historical,' as far as our present knowledge goes. Following out his inductive course of argument with singular persistency, M. Troyon has gone (as already said) so far as even to calculate the number of inhabitants who occupied the Lacustrine settlements of the western Swiss lakes during the bronze and stone periods respectively. The process by which he constructs this curious fabric of reasoning is as follows:

'Measuring the side of the village platform by the extent of space

occupied by the remains of piles, it is easy to form an approximative idea of the number of huts which the village might contain. One of the largest, that at Morges, is 1,200 feet long, by 150 of average breadth, which gives a surface of 180,000 square feet. Deducting half this surface for the room required for ways and open spaces; and covering the other with huts seventeen feet in diameter, thickness of walls inclusive, and leaving out the room left unoccupied in consequence of the circular form of the huts; we find that the settlement at Morges might count 311 huts. We may assume without danger of exaggeration an average of four inmates for each. Population therefore, 1,244. Assuming the same premises, the eight villages discovered on the lake of Neufchatel, measuring respectively from 8,000 to 160,000 square feet of surface, would contain in all 5000 inhabitants, or an average of 625 to the village. The 68 lacustrine settlements of Western Switzerland in the age of bronze would thus give a total of 42,500 inhabitants. While for the preceding period, the lacustrine population scattered from Lake Leman to the two shores of the Lake of Constance would be of 31,875 persons. If I enter into these details' (adds M. Troyon, modestly), 'it is especially with the object of inviting observations which may enable us to arrive at more complete results."

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He compares these numbers with that of the Helvetian emigration in the time of Julius Cæsar, 368,000 persons. (P. 403.)

Nor have our antiquaries shrunk from applying the same at once adventurous and logical method of inquiry to a problem of much greater interest-that of the antiquity and duration of what we have termed the stone and bronze periods in Switzerland. This they have endeavoured by the use of geological data. The following is the instance employed by M. Troyon:

Yverdun-famous half a century ago all over the world, on account of its citizen, Pestalozzi-is built between the site of the Roman (and Gaulish) city Eburodunum and the Lake of Neufchatel. It stands on ground gained from the lake by the alluvium of the Orbe torrent. The ridge on which Eburodunum stood is now 2,500 feet from the lake. It is presumable that it was abandoned for the modern Yverdun, in consequence of the gradual growth of this alluvium. And it seems, from evidence which M. Troyon details, that the ridge in question was still bathed by the lake about A.D. 300. If so, fifteen centuries have been required to raise a space 2,500 feet wide above the waters. Now following the same torrent of the Orbe above Eburodunum, and at 3,000 feet from that site, at the foot of a kind of island in the marsh called the Mont de Chamblon, we find rows of pileheads, indicative of the site of a village of the first period, buried several feet deep in the alluvium of the valley. There was therefore once a lacustrine village 3,000 feet from Eburodunum, and 5,500 feet from the present

lake. Now, assuming, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the rate of increase of the alluvium was the same before A.D. 300 as it has been since, this gives us some eighteen centuries more for the period which elapsed between the abandonment of this lacustrine village (on the retreating of the waters), and the era of A.D. 300 aforesaid. In other words, the abandonment in question took place 3,300 years ago; which, as it happens, agrees nearly with a similar estimate of M. Worsaae in his Northern Antiquities.

These calculations are no doubt ingenious, but M. Troyon himself readily admits that they are subject to many elements of uncertainty. In fact, another observer, M. Morlot (Leçon 'd'Ouverture d'un Cours sur la Haute Antiquité, fait à l'Aca'démie de Lausanne,' cited by Mr. Lubbock), arrives at a different result from the same process of calculation, applied in the case of similar lacustrine vestiges found in the alluvium of the Tinière, a torrent which falls into the head of Lake Leman at Villeneuve. The estimates obtained from his data incline M. Morlot on the whole, to suppose for the bronze 'era an antiquity of from 3,000 to 4,000 years, for the stone era of from 5,000 to 7,000 years.'*

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It will be seen that nothing has as yet transpired, through these Swiss discoveries, which militates very seriously with the assumptions of those who are resolved to abide by the limit of six thousand years, assigned by popular theology as the duration of man upon the earth. But no student can honestly or consistently embark on that vast sea of inquiry which modern ethnological speculation is opening, unless he is prepared to disregard a doctrine which first assumes that Scripture is intended to teach us chronology, and then establishes, as scriptural chronology, a mere series of traditional and most

We can do no more than advert in passing to the daring calculations which M. Morlot has just communicated to the Société Vaudoise des Sciences Naturelles (Revue Suisse, April, 1862), derived from the so-called diluvial deposits, in the valleys which open on the Lake of Geneva. 'There must have been successively a first glacier 'epoch, then a first diluvian epoch without large glaciers, then a 'second very long glacier epoch, then a second diluvian without large 'glaciers, and then the modern epoch.... The result of the whole 'inquiry is a duration of a thousand centuries at least for the last geological epoch, which commenced immediately after the disappearance of the great glaciers, characterised by the presence of the Mammoth (Elephas primigenius), and, as it would seem, by the first 'appearance of man; which duration ended at the commencement of the modern epoch, which last has now continued about one 'hundred centuries.'

imperfect deductions from Scripture. Whatever may have been the date of the subjugation or destruction of that Turanian,' or pre-historical people, whose existence and activity on the surface of Europe are now brought to light in so many unexpected ways, it is very certain that they must have been prior sojourners on the earth for some extensive period of time. Their works, performed with none but stone implements, are enormous; it may almost be said, more enormous in relation to the power which they wielded than the monuments of Egypt or Assyria. They possessed domesticated animals; in a few cases they tilled the ground. How many ages of stationary or slowly progressive condition do these circumstances indicate? Or, if we prefer the once popular theory of degeneracy, and believe that the inferior races of man are the deteriorated relics of an ancient and lost civilisation, then how many ages of decline must have preceded the state of timorous impotence, the diminutive figures and small bodily powers, of which these remains give evidence? And again, we have seen that the most ancient of these lacustrine people were only contemporary with our existing Fauna and Flora. The relics of the drift-men' discovered by M. Boucher de Perthes in the valley of the Somme, and since that time in Suffolk and elsewhere, while closely resembling those of the early lacustrines in character, are affirmed to be contemporary with those of the extinct animals of the Pleistocene' geological period.* Nay, one of the latest authorities on this subject, Mr. Prestwich (in a paper read before the Royal Society in March last) is disposed to assign to them a date antecedent to the excavation of many 'of our great river valleys.' In the face of discoveries which seem to stretch farther and farther back into the night of ages,

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'Where wilds immeasurably spread

Seem lengthening as we go,'

it behoves us for the present to maintain at least the attitude of serious and unprejudiced expectation. And we cannot refrain from introducing here certain very instructive remarks of Professor Owen, on the remains of a human individual of a singular race, the Mincopies' of the Andaman Islands. We quote from a recent number of Proceedings of the Geographical Society :'Professor Owen observed that the bones were those of a man to

* We do but touch on this highly interesting part of the subject on the present occasion for various reasons; one of which is, that we observe the announcement of an intended work on it by Sir Charles Lyell. No topic can be imagined better suited for that inductive genius, and that spirit of patient investigation, which have placed him at the head of his own class of scientific explorers.

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