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not held out quite to the end. But no bronze implement has been found, so that while these melting-pots clearly show the first appearance of an Age of Bronze, it may, at least, be argued that the settlement scarcely survived the intrusion.

thing which could be saved from total de- used for a hearth, a heap of corn and a struction by being packed in the peat mealing-stone to grind it on, a store of which was slowly growing and enclosing it flax with bits of made cloth, and the clayduring the whole history of the place. weights which were all that remained of the The unhewn trunks or hewn boards of the simple loom. To map out the settlement platform fell in if they were not burnt, and in this way is, of course, a task requirlie there still, showing how they were made ing endless care and patience; but Robenfast above to the tops of the piles with hausen has been very fortunate in its prowooden pins. From each hut rubbish and prietor and explorer. For the last ten lost articles were dropped into the water, years since he discovered the place, almost till the remains of the hut itself came down as soon as lake dwellings were thought of, on top. This natural museum forms the Herr Messikomer has been excavating, so-called relic-bed,' which is simply the preserving specimens, trying experiments lower level of peat upon the lake-bottom. to realise the savage arts of the former Scoop up a shovelful of it and examine its owners of his estate qualifying himself, contents. Lumps of a kind of soppy clay in fact, for life in a primæval Stone Age. are the remains of the compo,' as a build- It must really have been a shock to him er would call it, with which the platform when he had the misfortune of finding cerwas thickly plastered. Bits of charcoal tain earthen crucibles, with lumps of meltare everywhere, and it is not to be sup-ed bronze in them, which showed that even posed that they came from the fire-places at Robenhausen primitive simplicity had above, for only ashes are ever thrown away from a wood-fire; they must always indicate the remains of wood-work that has been burnt down. Sherds of pottery, of course unglazed, but of tolerable quality, come up in abundance; there is no end of the fish-scales and nut-shells; and bones are found by tons, dexterously broken in to get at the marrow. But as Herr Messikomer began to explore, foot by foot, this great rubbish-field, he became aware that these things are not mixed indiscriminately. The contents of each dwelling lie under it: here was a granary, and it was full of corn when it was burnt down, for the charred grains of barley may be scooped up by handfuls, and if you are fortunate you may even secure perfect ears with the beard on; and here was a flax-store, for there is the flax in hanks of spun thread, and in cords, nets, and plaited or woven cloth, and hard by are numbers of the earthenware cones which served for the weaver's loomweights. It used to be thought that the lake-dwellers must have kept their cows and pigs, sheep and goats, in secure pens on shore; but here it was clearly made out, for the first time, that the cattle were kept out in the lake, for their stalls are marked among the huts by the mass of stable-refuse, and there is even some reason to think that the natives gathered it into manure heaps to carry to their fields. In one spot the places and sizes of six separate huts were marked out, not by the posts or siding-boards of the huts themselves for these were no longer to be distinguished but by finding in each of six places, at equal distances, a set of remains evidently belonging to a separate establishment, namely, the great stones

--

As far as topography and other material details go, the history of the place may be made out with the most curious accuracy. Herr Messikomer, excavating at the edge of the Aa Brook Canal, found a state of things which at first puzzled him extremely. Below three feet of peat he came upon the remains of the earthen flooring of the lake-platform, with bits of cloth, charred apples, and such things, among it; but below this the peat began again, and lay for two or three feet above another bed of flooring and remains. At last he came upon a clear section farther on, and found evidence of three settlements, one above another. The first settlers had driven piles in the shell-marl of the lake-bottom; but before very long their village was burnt down, leaving a bed of bits of charcoal, mixed with grains of wheat and barley, bits of thread and cloth and fishingnets, all charred likewise by the fire, and thus in beautiful preservation for antiquarian purposes. The inhabitants set to work again, drove piles in great numbers, and lived long enough in their new huts for a bed of peat, three feet thick, to grow up beneath them, full of meat-bones and potsherds. Then a destruction like the first took place, and the charred heads of the piles remain to show how the settlement was burnt to the water's edge, while again the layer of charcoal, with the usual relics of corn and fruit, cloth and implements, mark the extent of the burnt vil

one

lage. When it was renewed for the third scarcely any geographical change has haptime, the builders had left off using stems pened since the time when the settlements. of fir-trees for their piles, and had taken were inhabited, in many places -- in the to splitting oak trunks instead; and such a Lake of Geneva, for instance- the remains depth of mixed peat and rubbish had ac- of the piles may be still discerned under cumulated on the spot since the days of the water, standing as they always stood, and first inhabitants, that these last ones sim- sometimes still five or six feet high from the ply drove their piles far enough into it, ground. Among these piles, strange to not reaching the ground of the lake at all. say, there lie bones, and potsherds, and This new settlement only covered a part weapons on the lake-bottom, just as they of the old site; but it was long inhabited, were dropped so many centuries ago, and and, unlike the others, it was not burnt the antiquary, paddling slowly above the down. It seems, indeed, that the peat had sites of such villages, sees his specimens at last grown so high that the lake became lying and picks them up with a pair of tongs a mere bog, and the settlers abandoned made to work with a cord at the end of a their homes. The peat grew till it reached long pole. How quiet has been their restthe top of the water, and since then the ing-place for ages, we may judge from M. decaying marsh-plants and the dust have Troyon's finding in one place a group of accumulated into the half-foot of mould earthenware fragments and putting them which covers the whole peat-field. This together into a large and complete vase, part is now cut for fuel, and in having it and in another securing a pair of bronze dug in places beyond the limits of the set- bracelets at one haul of the dredgetlement, which were then open lake, greenish and incrusted from having lain on Herr Messikomer made one of the most the lake-bottom in full sight from boats curious of his many acute inferences as to ever since it was dropped, the other sunk the history of his lake-men. In examining far enough into the mud to have remained the peats laid out to dry, it is seen that a as fresh as if but just out of the castingdistinct strip of bog, a few hundred yards mould. It was formerly held a doubtful wide, running north from the settlement, point whether the primitive dwellings were is full of bits of charcoal; but on both really built standing in the water, or whether sides of the strip there is none. Now, the they were not rather huts built on the low deadliest combination of circumstances to lake-banks, and protected by pile-dams a Swiss village is still, as of old, a fire from the flood. But it is now quite clear which happens when the furious south that the huts certainly stood on platforms wind, called the Föhnwind, blows. There on piles in the water, so that the accumuis little help against the conflagration then, lating peat or mud received all that dropped and hardly a town in central Switzerland from them, generation after generation. At has not at one time or another been thus Wangen, on the Lake of Constance, when devastated or utterly destroyed. When the water is low, we can now walk dryshod ancient Robenhausen was burnt--whether to the furthest piles of the old settlement; the first or the second time we do not but this is because the mould, sand, and know the track of the fierce south wind that swept the flames from hut to hut is still marked by the shower of embers which it carried along northward and dropped into the muddy lake.

Elsewhere in Switzerland, in places at the edge of the great lakes, where no peat grows, the alluvial mud deposited in the quiet bays chosen by the old settlers often imbeds the remains of their villages. It was so at Meilen, where the first discovery of them was made in excavating the deep mud-flats; and in other places, where the deposit is shallower, the dredging-machine travelling over the muddy bottom of the lakes still brings up remains in great quantities, though unfortunately much damaged in the process. On such ground the antiquary works with gentler means, dragging a toothed scraper from his boat and bringing up the mud in scoops. Where

gravel have accumulated over the spot since it was founded, so that even when the water is high part of the village is now on shore. But there has been no general shifting of level in the lakes of Switzerland since the time of the lake-men, and often things are just as they were. It is so at Morges, where the piles of a considerable settlement are to be seen some 500 feet from the shore, and 8 or 10 feet below low-water mark: among them lie some of the old timbers, and a dug-out canoe was to be seen halfburied in the mud. If the townspeople would only build there a group of fishermen's huts on piles, such as actually stood in the last century in the Limnat which flows into the Lake of Zürich, we should have the old Morges settlement at once restored to something of its pristine appearance.

In these old hut-platforms we see before

us the rude and early type of structures stormy waves of a great lake, which would in common use in our wooden piers and have swept away their solid woodwork bridges, in the pile-built houses of the Low while passing harmlessly through open lines Countries, or of the dismal flats of the of piles. lower Mississippi, where the inhabitants It is out in wider lakes that we find the cross to their outbuildings on pile-bridges, ancient builders constructing themselves and talk of the high land when they settlements which correspond to our modmean a mud-bank four feet above high- ern breakwaters, such as those of Portland water mark. But the lacustrine dwellings Harbour or Falmouth Docks. They drove of early Europe show also types of two piles in the lake-bottom, and then proother constructions still carried on in mod- ceeded to drop heavy stones among them ern times. One of these is the fascine- from boats or rafts, till the piles stood work used so successfully by Stephenson firmly imbedded in a solid stone island. in making his railway across the quaking They probably found it easier to raise the Chat Moss by laying brushwood and fag- bottom round the piles, than to drive the gots, and as the bog swallowed them up, piles into the bottom. Such stone-hillocks laying yet more and more, till at last they under water are not uncommon in Switzerbore their load. Under similar circum-land, and the fishermen call them steinstances the ancient inhabitants of the little bergs. There is a fine one in the Bielerswampy Moosseedorf, near Berne, appear to have made their communication with the shore by a road of piled faggots whose trace is still marked by the remains of cross branches lying in the peat. But they sometimes carried out the same idea on a large scale, and this in early Stone Age times. At Niederwyl, near Frauenfeld, there have been found the wonderfully perfect ruins of an island of timber and faggots, built up from the bottom of a little boggy lake, since grown into a peat-moor. The common pile-construction would not have answered here, for the piles would have given sideways, or quite sunk in the soft, swampy ground, under the heavy pressure of the huts; and they were therefore only driven in small numbers to serve as a framework and binding for beds of sticks and brushwood, which were sunk into their places by layers of sand and gravel laid on the top of each; and thus the wooden and earthen layers alternated throughout the pile to the surface of the water. On this artificial island the builders framed a solid structure of logs, and covered the whole with a rude board-platform. On this platform stood the huts, and the stumps of their side-posts were found, with even the skirting-boards which formed the lowest part of the side walls. No doubt we have in the drawings of this platform, as it first came to light, a representation of what the ordinary platform on piles would have looked like. The thick earthen floor, laid to keep out the damp, was still there, and even the very hearth-stones were in their places on the ground-floor of the huts as when they were deserted. These fascine-settlements were not so common as those supported on piles; in fact, though suited to the peculiar circumstances of a small and swampy pool, they would not have stood against the

see, which lies seven or eight feet under water, covering two or three acres of ground; and the piles are still to be seen projecting from it. Of course such a vast structure as this could not pass unnoticed; but Roman remains are found not far off, and till Swiss antiquaries became alive to the existence of their ancient lake-men, these piles were thought to belong to some Roman work. But the place is, in fact, an immense Bronze-Age settlement, full of the most interesting remains. The stones which form the great mound are waterworn boulders of quartz and granite, brought with great labour from the heights above Nidau, while at St. Peter's Island, a little way off, where there is another steinberg, a canoe fifty feet long and three or four feet wide, hollowed from a single trunk, was found at the bottom, freighted with stones for banking up the piles: no doubt it had been overloaded and had sunk there. In the Lake of Neufchâtel is another steinberg, that of Marin, which contains in vast quantities the relics of an Iron-Age settlement: such as above fifty iron swords, some with their sheaths, iron lance-heads, shield-plates, hatchets and clasps in profusion, and even a linch-pin and a couple of snaffle-bits.

From such Swiss constructions as these we pass naturally to the stockaded islands of Scotland. The crannogs proper, as Mr. Stuart calls them in his account contributed to Mr. Lee's work, combine in a very curious way both the Swiss types, the fascineisland, and the steinberg. A double enclosure of piles of young oak-trees was set up in the lake-bed; the outer palisade to serve as breakwater and fortification, the inner to form the wall of the artificial island, which was made by sinking logs in the bed of the lake, and heaping on the wood a

We should have roundly asserted such a thing to be out of the question anywhere, had it not been for recollecting a remark of one Gasparo Balbi, a Venetian jeweller, who was in Pegu in 1583, who accounts for the houses on piles as for safety from tigers. Yet even here the real motive was very likely the annual inundation of the country. Respecting tance, and from storming parties clamberthe pile-dwellings of Lake Maracaybo in South ing up their scaffolds, their position was whether, like so many savage very strong. But it would be interesting

America, the remarkable statement has been made
that the Indians resort to this aquatic life to escape to ascertain
the mosquitoes, which infest the shores.

tribes, the early Swiss had hit upon the de- If science had accepted the theory provice of setting a besieged village in flames pounded in the early days of the lake-infrom a distance with flights of fire-javelins vestigations, that the piles were the remains or arrows. Against such an attack the be- of great beaver-villages, the fishermen of sieged would have had little chance when Thonon and Evian might have been now the invaders' boats were once in numbers telling as matter of history legends of these in the lake around them; and very likely gigantic beavers, and pointing in confirmathe conflagrations, which we know so often tion to the supposed remains of their dams devastated the settlements built with such still standing in the water. Unless a tradipainful perseverance, were frequently the tion of lake settlements can be proved to work of hostile hands. M. Le Hon, in- have existed before 1853, the time when stead of reproducing Dr. Keller's ideal res- the news of the discovered lake dwellings toration of a Swiss lake village in peaceful spread throughout Switzerland, we must occupation, has chosen for a 'sensational' continue to believe that they were utterly frontispiece to his work on Fossil Man' forgotten up to the time when the antiquathe moment of a conflagration in the midst ries succeeded in re-constructiug something of a raging tempest, with the wretched na- of their annals. These at least touch histives plunging headlong into the lake, or tory at their nearer end, for the latest Ironescaping in their canoes. On the whole, Age villages come down to the Gallowe prefer the quieter pictures, which show Roman period. Backward from this they the natives at their every-day work, fishing, extend, we know not how far, into a dark paddling in dug-out canoes, or hanging out and distant past. Their race, and the dates their nets. Such drawings give great of their occupation, cannot yet be made reality to our ideas of Swiss lake-men, out with any approach to certainty; yet we while almost all their details have some sort find among the ruins of their homes the of evidence to rest on, except, perhaps, the materials for determining much of the hiscircular huts which are still sometimes rep- tory of their culture. It will be best to resented. M. Troyon cleverly calculated give a brief account of this interesting the shape and size of these supposed circu- series of facts and arguments, before conlar huts, from the curvature of the bits of cluding with such few and doubting remarks clay-plastering which had fallen into the as may be made on their place among Eurowater, baked to brick when the wattled pean tribes, and their date in the calendar huts were burnt down. But his ingenious of history. argument has come to nothing on closer ex- By all who take an interest in the probamination of these irregularly-warped frag- lem whether or not human civilisation is to ments, and it is undervaluing the construc- be considered a product of gradual develtive skill of the lake-dwellers to suppose opment upward from an early savage state them wasting a considerable fraction of the of mankind, it will be seen as a highly implatform-space acquired with such enor-portant fact that the history of the Swiss mous labour, by building circular huts on lake-dwellers is the history of a gradual it instead of the oblong ones usual elsewhere, and of which remains are actually found at Niederwyl.

development in civilisation. They make their first appearance as thoroughly in the Stone-Age as the South Sea Islanders who We have seen that many lake settlements, planted the iron nails in expectation of such as those now actually inhabited in the reaping a crop of these valuable vegetables. Eastern Archipelago or in Dahome, the At Wangen, or Moosseedorf, or the fascine medieval ones of Ireland or Syria, and the platform of Wauwyl, there has not been more ancient ones still of Lake Prasias, found among the thousands of stone hatchcome within the range of written history. ets, knives, and arrow-heads, any trace of But no history mentions the Swiss lake metal. They must have lived for many dwellings; they were utterly forgotten by centuries in such places as these, with only the people who have since lived on the implements of stone, horn and bone, and shore hard by and paddled day by day over even these often of lower quality than such their sites. There was indeed a paragraph as are found among the modern Maoris or in our newspapers three or four years ago, Caribs. They used the ordinary stonein which a traveller declared that he had flake knives, leather-scrapers, spears, arrowfound on the south side of the lake of Ge- heads, and celts, of savages all over the neva a real tradition that people here once world; at Robenhausen the stone hatchetlived in villages out in the lake. But sto- blade has even been found in its hole in the ries in the form of tradition are hopelessly very wooden club which served as its hanvitiated when they embody, as this does, dle, and at Moosseedorf the little jagged the results of modern scientific opinion. I stone saw was picked up in the worm-eaten