Denmark when the firs were growing, a flint
instrument having been found underneath one
of these fallen trees. When the Scotch firs
ceased to grow, oaks became common, and at the
same time there lived the alder, birch, and hazel.
But, in its turn, oak is now rare in Denmark, and
the common beech predominates. The aspen,
which still flourishes, is found at all depths in
the bogs, and appears to have lived through all
these changes in the dress of Madame Dania.

A stone implement has been found under one
of the old fallen firs. Stone implements in
abundance are to be found in Danish bogs and
sand dunes. Old articles of bronze and iron are
also found; and, by observation and argument,
Danish and Swedish antiquaries arrive at the
conclusion that there were successive ages of
stone, of bronze, of iron. The age of stone
in Denmark, when men worked only by the help
of flint tools and fire, is found to have
corresponded with the period of Scotch fir vegetation,
and a part at least of the oak epoch: the
age of bronze, when men recognised and used
fusible copper in its ores, and turned it to use by
hardening it with a tenth part of tin. This age
of bronze certainly corresponded with a
considerable part of the oak period. But the age
of iron, when men recognised the more valuable
metal in the more stone-like and less fusible iron
ores, corresponded to that of the beech-tree.

We come out of the Danish bog and dry
ourselves by taking a long walk on the Danish
coast. Here we may see, at certain points,
along nearly all the shores of the Danish islands,
heaps of waste oyster-shells, cockle-shells, and
waste of other edible shell-fish, mixed with
bones of divers eatable beasts and birds and
fishes. "I have seen," says Sir Charles, "similar
large heaps of oysters and other marine shells,
with interspersed stone implements, near the
sea-shore, both in Massachusetts and in Georgia,
United States, 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." The
Danes call these mounds—which are from three
to ten feet high, and some of them a thousand
feet long by two hundred wide—kitchen-middens.
Sharpened by rubbing, flint knives, hatchets,
and other instruments of stone, horn, wood, and
bone, with fragments of coarse pottery, are
scattered through them; but there is never any
implement of bronze or iron. Such heaps are
wanting on the coasts bordering the German
Ocean, where the waves are now slowly eating
away the land. We have yet clearer evidence
of the antiquity of these refuse heaps, in the
fact that, although the shells are all of living
species, the oyster-shells are full-grown and well
formed, though the oyster cannot now live in the
brackish waters of the Baltic; and the shells of
the eatable cockles, mussels, and periwinkles,
common in these refuse heaps, are of the full
natural size, though they are now stunted in the
adjacent waters to a third of their size by the
quantity of river-water poured into the Baltic.
In the days of the hunters and fishers of that
period, the Baltic was certainly more open to
the ocean than it now is: "probably," says Sir
Charles Lyell, "through the peninsula of Jutland
having been at no remote period an archipelago.
Even in the course of the present century,
the salt waters have made one eruption 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."

Of the remains of beasts in the old Danish
kitchen heaps, all are of animals now existing on the
land, except the wild bull, which is an historical
character, for it was seen by Julius Cæsar, and
survived after his time. There are frequent
remains of the beaver, long since destroyed in
Denmark, and of the seal, now rare on the coast.
All marrow-bones have been broken. Gristly
parts have been gnawed as if by dogs, and
the bones generally that a dog will break up and
eat are said to be just those that are missing
from the skeletons of birds. The remains of
the dogs themselves show their race to have
been smaller than it was in the bronze period;
and, in this stone period, there are no remains of
the domestic ox, or horse, or sheep. Of the
people themselves of this age (who were no
cannibals) some skulls have been found which show
that they, too, were of small stature, with round
heads and overhanging eyebrows, after the manner
of the modern Laplanders. When did
these people eat their oysters by the Danish
shore? The very bronze period is pre-historic.
In the time of the Romans, the Danish isles
were covered, as now, with magnificent beech
forests. The beech has been luxuriant in
Denmark for eighteen centuries; yet, in the bronze
period, there were few or no beeches, and the
land was covered with oak: while the pine forests
by which these folks of the stone period hunted
the land and fished the sea existed even before
the days of the oak. The peat covering some of
their remains, is the growth of at least four
thousand years; but there is nothing in the rate
of the growth of peat, opposed to the imagination
of a period four times older.

Quitting the Danish bog and shore, we now
follow our guide to Switzerland. Here, in the
shallow parts of many lakes, where there is a
depth of no more than from five to fifteen 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.
Herodotus speaks of the use of such dwellings, five
hundred and twenty years before the birth of
Our Saviour, by a Thracian tribe, on a small
mountain lake of PÅ“onia, now part of modern
Roumelia. The huts where the PÅ“onians lived
with their families and horses, were built on
platforms raised over the lake by the piles on