which they rested. A causeway of the same
formation, easily removed in case of danger,
joined the platform to the shore.*
* See also Subterranean Switzerland, volume ii.,
page 25.

It was in the dry winter of nine years ago,
when the lakes and rivers sank lower than had
ever before been known, that these foundations of
Swiss lake-villages attracted notice. The people
of Meilen, on the Lake of Zurich, resolved to
raise the level of some of the exposed ground,
and turn it into land by throwing on it mud
obtained by dredging in the adjacent shallow
water. The dredgers found a number of wooden
piles deeply driven into the bed of the lake, and
among them a great many hammers, axes, and
other instruments—all of stone, except a bronze
hatchet, and an armlet of brass wire. There
were found, also, fragments of rude
hand-fashioned pottery, and masses of charred timber,
supposed to belong to the original platform.
The quantity of burnt timber here and in other
like situations, seems to indicate that many of
these settlements perished by fire. The rapid
increase in the depth of the water had
compelled the building of such island forts too near
the shore to be safe from the attack of fiery
projectiles. The PÅ“onians, who were in the
middle of their lake, saved by its fish from
famine, defied Xerxes himself.

The construction of these ancient villages has
been inferred from similar buildings now erected
by the Papoos of New Guinea, and from Swiss
fishing-huts constructed on the same plan, on
the river Limmat, near Zurich, so late as the
last century: while the circular form of some of
the huts is inferred from the shape of burnt
fragments of the clay that seems to have formed
their lining. Remains of fishing gear, in cords,
hooks, and stones used as weights—even a whole
sunken canoe, hollowed from a single tree-trunk
fifty feet long, that had apparently been
overladen with stones for foundation-making—have
been found. It is believed that there were
sometimes as many as three hundred huts and a
thousand people in one settlement. At Langen,
it is calculated that no less than forty thousand
piles were driven; probably not all by one
generation. Sites of such villages have been
traced on the Lakes of Constance, Zurich, Geneva,
and Neufchatel, and on most of the smaller
lakes. Some are exclusively of the stone, but
others are of the bronze age. Of the bronze
age alone there are more than twenty on the
Lake of Geneva, twelve on the Lake of
Neufchatel, ten on the small Lake of Bienne. On the
little Lake of Moosseedorf near Berne, the
clippings of flint that must have been brought
from a distance, indicate that there may have
been a manufactory of stone implements upon
that spot. There, also, have been found hatchets
and wedges of jade and articles in amber. At
Wangen, on the Lake of Constance, hatchets of
serpentine and greenstone, and arrow-heads of
quartz, have been met with; also, remains of
a kind of plaited cloth, supposed to be of flax,
lumps of burnt wheat, and even flat round cakes
of bread. The stone people here, also, are found
to have domesticated the ox, sheep, and goat,
as well as the dog. There have lain in the
mud on the site of their village charred apples
and pears of small size, such as still grow in the
Swiss forests, stones of the wild plum, raspberry
and blackberry seeds, beech-nuts, and hazel-nuts.

Implements of the later bronze period, found
under old lake settlements of the "bronze
people," closely resemble those of a corresponding
age in Denmark. But hitherto settlements
of the bronze period have only been found in
Western and Central Switzerland. In the more
Eastern lakes, those of the stone period alone
have as yet been discovered. The refuse bones
—always with the marrow-bones broken—show
that in the stone period the flesh of hunted
beasts was more eaten than that of the domestic
cattle or sheep; in the bronze period the reverse
is the case, and even the tame pig is found to
have replaced the wild boar as an article of food.
In the beginning of the age of stone, there were
more goats than sheep in Switzerland. At the
end of it, there were more sheep than goats.
The Swiss lake-dwellers of the stone period ate
fox freely, and abstained from hare. A single
fragment only of the bone of a hare has been
found at Moosseedorf. The Laplanders avoid
hare from a superstitious motive, and Cæsar
found also that the ancient Briton would not
eat hares, hens, nor geese.

The only human skull that has been dredged
from among the ruins of any of these lake
villages simply resembles that of a modern Swiss.
The few imperfect attempts that have been made
to estimate, from natural changes, the remoteness
of the stone period in Switzerland, agree in
dating it from five to seven thousand years ago.

In the British islands, also, there are
unexplored remains of such lake dwellings. In the
lakes of Ireland, forty-six of them, called
crannoges, have been observed. They were not built
on platforms supported by piles deeply driven
into the mud, but were stockaded artificial islets
of timber and stone. One of them in
Ardekillin Lake, Roscommon, is surrounded by a
stone wall raised on oak piles.

From Ireland to Egypt. In the years 'fifty-one
and 'fifty-four, borings were made in the
alluvial land of Egypt, partly at the expense of
the Royal Society, to whom Mr. Leonard Horner
had suggested certain experiments for testing
the age of a given thickness of Nile sediment.
On ground distant from villages, seventy shafts
and Artesian borings were sunk. Burnt brick
was found covered with sixty feet of Nile mud,
Egyptian burnt brick, more than three thousand
years old, much older than the Roman domination,
is to be seen in the British Museum. But
if the pieces of brick buried sixty feet deep
under deposit of the inundation, had really been
covered to that depth by slow course of nature,
and if the calculation be true that the deposit
of Nile mud on the plain of Egypt raises the
ground but five inches in a century, then that
brick must have been made by men who were