The geologist, the zoologist, antiquarian, and historian now may find themselves in the same sphere of investigation, and inquiring on the same subject: namely, Man and his age upon the earth. And the memorials of man thus furnished have a twofold bearing the one bearing on his original condition, his customs, manners, mode of life and historic changes; the other on the tracing of the signs of his existence back into periods remote from the received chronology.

These fossil remains of man, comprising bones, implements of stone and flint; bits of wood, bone, or stone marked by tools; pottery, bronze and iron implements, lake dwellings, offal remains, are valuable contributions to history. They give large promise of help in filling up some of the blanks of primitive human records; of converting myths and traditions into veritable history; of supplying some of the links of that chain of human progress which we call civilization. As we look upon these ancient memorials of our ancestors, rude men of our own blood, our hearts are moved by the emotions of a common life, as in a clear imagination we gather with them to their crude feasts of fish and fowl and beast and grain; at their places of sepulture of their dead, honored by the living with the gift of weapons and viands to serve them in the spirit-land; on their lake dwellings, clustering a distance from the shore into a village, like a faint primeval type of splendid medieval Venice; at work with fire and stone tools shaping canoes, and then exchanging, in the progress of time, these implements of stone for those of bronze and iron. The geologist and antiquarian are writing human history, and the time is at hand when the writer of ancient history must deal no less with the conclusions of natural science than with traditions and the results of philology in determining the old races of man and their history.

But it is the attempt to place the creation of man in a period anterior to the Biblical Chronology about which we are at present concerned, and of which we propose a brief résumé both as to the facts themselves and the interpretation of these facts as given us in the present condition of the question.

THE DANISH PEAT AND SHELL MOUNDS-SWISS LAKE DWELLINGS.

The deposits of peat in Denmark vary in depth from ten to thirty feet, and in it at various depths lie trunks of trees, some

now natives of Denmark, others not. Among the trees not now native and buried in the peat-mosses is the Scotch fir, (pinus sylvestris.) This Scotch fir was afterward supplanted by the sessile variety of the common oak, and this oak in its turn by the common beech. This beech alone belongs to historical times, and yet it is supposed that the human period. extended back to the times when the Scotch fir grew along the borders of the peat-mosses, for a stone implement of man's make was found buried in the peat below a trunk of the Scotch fir. If the stone implement lies exactly where it was lost, then the human period reaches backward through the many centuries required for the formation of the beds of peat, and the exchanges of the fir for the oak and of that for the beech.

Another class of human memorials are the Shell mounds, “Kitchen-refuse-heaps," (Kjökkenmödding,) found along the shores of nearly all the Danish Islands. These mounds contain the shells of the oyster, cockle, and other mollusks, mixed up with the bones of quadrupeds, (but not of extinct species,) birds, and fish, and scattered through these are "flint knives, hatchets, and other instruments of stone, bone, horn, and wood, 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 have been sharpened by rubbing. The mounds are from three to ten feet high, and some of them. one thousand feet long and from one hundred and fifty to two hundred wide, and are always near the shore. The proofs that these mounds are of considerable antiquity are, first, they are not found on those parts of the coast of the Western Ocean where the waves are slowly eating away the land; secondly, the shells, as of the oyster, cockle, and mussel, are of the size which they now have in the ocean, whereas the same species now met with in the adjoining parts of the Baltic have only a third of the ancient size, being stunted by the quantity of fresh water poured by the rivers into the Baltic; hence the inference that in the days of these eaters the ocean had a freer access to the Baltic than at present. Such a fact carries us back of known historical record.

Still another class of human memorials are the ancient dwellings built on piles in the shallow parts of many Swiss lakes, where to this day, under favorable circumstances, the wooden

piles may still be seen. These have once supported villages of an unknown date, but most of them belonged to the age of stone implements, for hundreds of these implements, resembling those of the Danish peat mosses and shell mounds, have been dredged up from the mud in which the piles are driven. Such instruments are axes, hammers, celts; and among other remains are pieces of rude pottery, fishing tackle, such as bits of cord and hooks made of bone; masses of charred wood, probably the timbers on which the cabins were built, and which were probably destroyed by fire. In western and central Switzerland, however, the implements are of bronze, and the piles themselves are not so much decayed as those where the stone implements are found. The number of these lake dwellings where the bronze implements are found is upward of seventy.

One historical use of the study of these remains of human workmanship and customs, whether found in the sand dunes on the coast, in shell-mounds in Irish and Swiss lakes, in peatbeds and in alluvial and other formation, has been the establishment for Western Europe of the chronological succession of periods styled the Ages of Stone, of Bronze, and of Iron, and named from the material of the implements in use by the natives. But from the fact that these implements of stone have as yet been found in central and northern Europe, and not in Asia, the terms Age of Stone and of Bronze properly belong as yet only to the history of Europe.

Certain archæologists and geologists have endeavored to give positive dates to the Ages of Stone and Bronze. The Stone Age reaches back about, but not over seven thousand years. The most elaborate calculation to estimate definitely in years the antiquity of the bronze and stone periods is that made by M. Morlot respecting the delta of the Tinière, a torrent flowing into the Lake of Geneva near Villeneuve. This small delta is in the shape of a flattened cone, having a regular internal structure containing three layers of vegetable soil, each of which must once have formed the surface of the cone. The first layer is five inches thick and four feet below the surface, and contains Roman tiles and coin, and hence belongs to the Roman period. The second layer is six inches thick, and ten feet from the surface, and contains fragments of unvarnished pottery and

*Lyell's Antiquity of Man, chap. ii.

instruments of bronze, and hence belongs to the Bronze period. The third layer is about six inches thick and nineteen feet from the surface, and in it were found rude pottery, pieces of charcoal, broken bones, and hence classed from these and other remains with the Stone period. M. Morlot, assuming the Roman period to represent an antiquity of from sixteen to eighteen hundred years, and by the simple calculation of times proportionate to the depths below the surface, assigns to the Bronze period a date of about three thousand five hundred years, and to the Stone period between five thousand and seven thousand years. Besides this chronological computation, others have been made which agree in the main with this one of M. Morlot.

But this antiquity of the Stone period, as determined by the antiquity of the Roman period, is too great. For there is a strange historico-antiquarian assumption in this case in regard to the Roman remains found in the fluviatile drift, and which had been washed down into the delta from the ruins of some Roman buildings. The river and its delta lying on the eastern side of Lake Geneva, the Roman ruins would much more naturally date from the decline of the Roman power and customs than from the time of their active controlling occupancy, and the buildings, whatever they were, would most naturally fall into decay, and the tiles thus be subject to be washed by floods down into the delta at the time of this decline. Now Villeneuve is near the southern border of ancient Helvetia, and up to the fifth century Roman language, habits, and manners prevailed in this region. Nor would there be a probability of such structural ruins until after 496 A. D., when the Franks took possession of the country, and the old inhabitants lost their nationality and became the serfs or subjects of their more northern Frankish conquerors. We may then assume for the date of the dilapidation of the Roman buildings from 500 to 600 A. D. Assuming this date from which to calculate the age of the Stone period, we have the average proportionate to the dates taken by Morlot from 4000 to 5000; or at an average, 2500 B. C. This brings the Stone age down to the historic traditions of early European times. And if in addition to this we suppose that the first formations were much more rapidly formed than the later ones, which we are entitled to do,

from the physical description given by the term "flattened cone-shaped delta," there will be no noticeable disagreement with the common chronology. Moreover, if we accept the Septuagint chronology, which we prefer for many reasons to the Usherian one, and thereby add at least six hundred years to our time before Christ, then all difficulty whatever vanishes, and these human remains and memorials are nothing more - than elucidations of the early history of our race, in nowise disagreeing with its commonly accepted antiquity.

THE ALLUVIAL PLAIN OF THE NILE.

Some years ago shafts were sunk and borings made in the land of Egypt through the Nile mud. These borings penetrated to the depth of seventy feet and less, and in numerous cases pieces of burnt brick and pottery were brought up from sixty to seventy feet below the surface. The average increase of Nile mud formed from the sedimentary deposit during the annual inundation has been estimated vaguely at from two and one-fourth to six inches a century, which would give us the existence of an Egyptian people from twelve thousand to thirty thousand years ago. Here in this land of myths we have a proposed antiquity to which the European Stone period is quite modern, and which reaches far back of the earliest records of the first king as Herodotus gives it, copying from the Egyptian priests.

We visit the region where poetry, and myth, and tradition have placed a most ancient civilization-Egypt, the Black Land, the Land of the Nile: we search its royal sepulchers, its manifold history written in funeral records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions and in the thousand relics preserved by domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the embalmed remains of the dead, and we find ourselves thrown back to a date far beyond any received date of history.*

An answer to the evidences of the high antiquity thus given by the excavations in the valley of the Nile has been attempted on the supposition that bricks and bits of pottery might have fallen into the ancient wells which were common in that land, and a shaft might have been sunk in one of these. But this solution is not admissible; for seventy out of the ninety-five borings were away from the sites of towns and villages, and

*Races of the Old World.-BRACE.