marine shells, with interspersed stone implements, near the sea-shore, both in Massachusetts and in Georgia, U.S., 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. 'Such accumulations are called by the Danes, Kjökkenmödding, or "Kitchen-refuse-heaps." Scattered all through them are flint knives, hatchets, and other instruments of stone, horn, wood, and bone, with fragments of coarse pottery, mixed with charcoal and cinders, but never any implements of bronze, still less of iron. The stone hatchets and knives had been sharpened by rubbing, and in this respect are one degree less rude than those of an older date, associated in France with the bones of extinct mammalia, of which more in the sequel. The mounds vary in height from 3 to 10 feet, and in area are some of them 1000 feet long, and from 150 to 200 wide. They are rarely placed more than 10 feet above the level of the sea, and are confined. to its immediate neighbourhood, or if not (and there are cases where they are several miles from the shore), the distance is ascribable to the entrance of a small stream, which has deposited sediment, or to the growth of a peaty swamp, by which the land has been made to advance on the Baltic, as it is still doing in many places, aided, according to M. Puggaard, by a very slow upheaval of the whole country at the rate of two or three inches in a century.' -as Mounds corresponding in main features with the above have been seen by Lyell on the sea-shore of Massachusetts and Georgia, and by Lubbock very recently on the coast of Morayshire. In all cases their antiquity is considerable, but indeterminate.. In Scandinavia, where they most abound, they are absent from the western coast-probably worn away with time. Another mark of high antiquity is found in the prevalent shells—a oysters (which no longer live in the brackish Baltic, except near its mouth), cockles, mussels, and periwinkles-all now reduced in size in the Baltic, but found of full size in the mounds, just as they occur in the ocean. Hence it seems fair to infer that in the days of the aboriginal hunters and fishers the ocean had freer access than now to the Baltic, communicating probably through the peninsula of Jutland.' The quadrupeds found in the mounds all belong to species which now exist, or are recorded historically, in Europe. In the latter division we find the great wild bull, whose remains are frequent, but not the aurochs of Lithuania. Beavers long since destroyed in Denmark, and seals now very rare there, occur with red-deer and roe, but not reindeer. Lynx, fox, and wolf are found; but, except the dog, no domesticated animal. The domestic ox, horse, and sheep, which were wanting in the mounds, are also absent from the older parts of the Danish peat-bogs, but occur in those parts which contain bronze and iron implements. The wild bull bull and larger mammalia served for food to the men of the period, who split the bones containing the marrow. Dogs left marks of their teeth on the hard and large bones, and probably consumed the smaller and softer, especially those of birds. The dogs were of a smaller race than later examples from the bronze period, and these yield in size to the dogs of the iron age. (p. 15.) Among the bones of birds, the great auk, now fast disappearing in the extreme North, is recognised; and the capercailzie, which has been reintroduced into Scotland. The aborigines are thought to have resided all through the year, because of the occurrence in the mounds of the wild swan, now only a winter visitor, and of the horns of the roe deer in every stage of growth. They ventured to sea in canoes scooped out of a single tree, and brought back deep-sea fishes, such as herring, cod, and flounder. They were not cannibals, for no human bones are mingled with the spoils of the chase.' What manner of men they were, indeed, is inferred from skulls obtained from peat and tumuli, 'believed to be contemporaneous with the mounds.' Their crania are small and round, with prominent supra-orbital ridges, like those of the Laplanders; while the skulls of the later ages of bronze and iron are longer and larger. Neither in the peat, mounds, nor tumuli of the early stone period are any traces of cereals discovered. They had no agriculture, but were not ignorant of fire, employing for fuel wood and sea-wrack: What may be the antiquity of the earliest human remains preserved in the Danish peat cannot be estimated in centuries with any approach to accuracy. In the first place, in going back to the bronze age, we already find ourselves beyond the reach of history or even of tradition. In the time of the Romans the Danish Isles were covered, as now, with magnificent beech forests. Nowhere in the world does this tree flourish more luxuriantly than in Denmark, and eighteen centuries seem to have done little or nothing towards modifying the character of the forest vegetation. Yet in the antecedent bronze period there were no beech trees, or at most but a few stragglers, the country being then covered with oak. In the age of stone, the Scotch fir prevailed, and already there were human inhabitants in those old pine forests. How many generations of each species of tree flourished in succession before the pine was supplanted by the oak, and the oak by the beech, can be but vaguely conjectured, but the minimum of time required for the formation of so much peat must, according to the estimate of Steenstrup and other good authorities, have amounted to at least 4000 years; and there is nothing in the observed rate of the growth of peat opposed to the conclusion that the number of centuries may not have been four times as great, even though though the signs of Man's existence have not yet been traced down to the lowest or amorphous stratum. As to the" shell-mounds," they correspond in date to the older portion of the peaty record, or to the carliest part of the age of stone as known in Denmark.'—pp. 16, 17. Nor, we may add, on the other hand, is there anything in the observed rate of the growth of peat to prevent our adopting a period much shorter than 4000 years. For if a coin of Gordian was found, as De Luc assures us, thirty feet deep in peat, at Groningen; and a boat loaded with bricks was found in the lowest layer of the peat in the now famous valley of the Somme, we need not give mythical numbers to the age of peat. The history of peat is, however, too important an element in all attempts to compute the antiquity of man in Northern climates to be passed over in this way. The peat period of Europe undoubtedly extends backward in time beyond all the historical records of these countries, and even reaches the epoch of the great extinct mammalia; for in the British Isles it commonly includes, or immediately covers, skeletons of the great deer of Ireland, which in several caves and gravel beds was mixed with remains of elephant and rhinoceros; and near Sprottau, in Silesia, bones of Elephas primigenius are mentioned with cones of Pinus sylvestris. It contains in many instances bones of animals which no longer inhabit the neighbouring regions, as Bos primigenius, and the red-deer, roebuck, reindeer, beaver, and wild boar; so that we may fairly regard it as filling the whole, or nearly the whole, interval of time which has elapsed since that epoch when the great mammoth and his contemporaries roamed in the forests of Northern Europe. On this account we cannot but regret the extreme brevity with which the subject is treated by the author, who lays no sufficient foundation for his estimate of 4000, or four times that number of years, either by a large series of facts selected by himself, or a critical analysis of the opinions of others. If to remedy this great want we turn to former works of the same author, the effect is to satisfy us that the rate of the growth of peat, though very unequal, and variable with local climate and accidental circumstances, was, on the whole, not slow in former times. Thus within half a century after the overthrow of a forest by a storm in Ross-shire, the inhabitants were digging fuel from a peat-moss, to which the fall of the trees had given rise. 'In Hatfield Moss, in Yorkshire, which appears clearly to have been a forest eighteen hundred years ago, fir-trees have been found ninety feet long, and sold for masts and keels of ships; oaks have also been discovered there above one hundred feet long. The dimensions of an oak from this moss are given in the "Philosophical Transactions," No. 275, which must have been larger than any tree now existing in the British dominions. 'In the same moss of Hatfield, as well as in that of Kincardine, in Scotland, and several others, Roman roads have been found covered to the depth of eight feet by peat. All the coins, axes, arms, and other utensils found in British and French mosses, are also Roman; so that a considerable portion of the peat in European peat-bogs is evidently not more ancient than the age of Julius Cæsar. Nor can any vestiges of the ancient forests described by that general, along the line of the great Roman Way in Britain, be discovered, except in the ruined trunks of trees in peat. 'De Luc ascertained that the very sites of the aboriginal forests of Hercinia, Semana, Ardennes, and several others, are now occupied by mosses and fens; and a great part of these changes have, with much probability, been attributed to the strict orders given by Severus, and other emperors, to destroy all the wood in the conquered provinces. Several of the British forests, however, which are now mosses, were cut at different periods, by order of the English parliament, because they harboured wolves or outlaws. Thus the Welsh woods were cut and burnt, in the reign of Edward I.; as were many of those in Ireland, by Henry II., to prevent the natives from harbouring in them, and harassing his troops.' ,米 We have no hesitation in preferring the shorter period, which these and many other instances suggest-a period extending, perhaps, about twice as far back as the days of Julius Cæsarto the longer and less definite stretch of ages which seem now to be suggested by Sir C. Lyell, rather, perhaps, in conformity with the opinions of others, than as the expression of his own deliberate judgment. A third series of monuments of the recent period, from which more full information of the manners and customs of the early people may be gathered, is presented in the ancient dwellings built on piles in the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, after the fashion which was noted by Herodotus among the Thracians of Paonia. There, in the middle of a mountain lake called Prasias, on platforms resting on piles, and connected with the shore by a narrow wooden causeway, the natives lived and fished in safety, and escaped the assaults of Xerxes.† In the Swiss lakes similar constructions were frequent; and from the mud which surrounded them hundreds of implements resembling those of the Danish shell-mounds and peat-mosses have *Princ. of Geology,' 9th edition, ch. xlv., p. 721. been been dredged. In the Lake of Zurich piles were found driven into the mud, and hammers, axes, celts, and other instruments, all of the stone period, except an armlet of thin brass wire and a small bronze hatchet. Fragments of rude pottery and charred wood were abundant; the burnt-clay lining of round huts is traced; fishing gear, as cord, hooks, stones for weights. Canoes made of a single tree were used, and stones were carried in them. As might be conjectured from such a list of discovered treasures, these lake dwellings are of unequal antiquity, some being of the stone period, and others of the bronze period. In the small lake of Moosseedorf, near Berne, implements of stone, horn, and bone were found, but none of metal. The stone was chiefly flint, brought, probably, from the south of France. Rude instruments of jade, supposed to have been brought from the East; and amber, of which the source is, with greater reason, attributed to the shores of the Baltic, were also found. In the Lake of Constance, hatchets of serpentine and greenstone, and arrow-heads of quartz, have been found; also woven cloth (flax?), carbonised wheat, grains of barley, cakes of bread, carbonised apples and small pears, stones of wild plum, seeds of raspberry and blackberry, beech-nuts and hazel-nuts. In this stone period the natives, besides cultivating cereals, had domesticated the dog, ox, sheep, and goat. The settlements of the bronze period are marked by tools, ornaments, and pottery, closely resembling those of the same age in Denmark. The animal remains are numerous. Twenty-four mammals, including the great wild bull, and the aurochs, but not the reindeer; eighteen birds; three reptiles; nine fishes. They all, or nearly all, served for food; the bones of the large ruminants were split for marrow, as in the shell-mounds of Denmark. The hunters of the earlier period preferred the flesh of the stag, roe, and wild boar; the more settled people of later date were gratified by beef, mutton, and pig-meat. Goats seem to have been more plentiful in the earlier part of the age of stone, sheep in the later. Foxes prevailed in the stone period, but large dogs in the bronze period. Hares seem not to have been used for food-an error committed by our own ancestors, as well as by Oriental people in early times. Many curious facts have been discovered in relation to the domesticated animals and their successive varieties, and these may eventually clear up some of the uncertainty which clouds the history of our familiar four-footed companions; but of the men themselves only a few bones have been found. One skull dredged up at Meilen, in the Lake of Zurich, is intermediate between the long-headed and shortheaded forms. From all that has been said, it seems probable that |