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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

lage. When it was renewed for the third time, the builders had left off using stems of fir-trees for their piles, and had taken to splitting oak trunks instead; and such a depth of mixed peat and rubbish had accumulated on the spot since the days of the first inhabitants, that these last ones sim

scarcely any geographical change has happened since the time when the settlements. were inhabited, in many places--in the Lake of Geneva, for instance - the remains of the piles may be still discerned under water, standing as they always stood, and 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 dredge - one tlement, 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, is full of bits of charcoal; but on both sides of the strip there is none. Now, the deadliest combination of circumstances to a Swiss village is still, as of old, a fire which happens when the furious south wind, called the Föhnwind, blows. There is little help against the conflagration then, and hardly a town in central Switzerland has not at one time or another been thus devastated or utterly destroyed. When ancient Robenhausen was burnt--- whether the first or the second time we do not 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

point whether the primitive dwellings were really built standing in the water, or whether they were not rather huts built on the low lake-banks, and protected by pile-dams from the flood. But it is now quite clear that the huts certainly stood on platforms on piles in the water, so that the accumulating peat or mud received all that dropped from them, generation after generation. At Wangen, on the Lake of Constance, when the water is low, we can now walk dryshod to the furthest piles of the old settlement; but this is because the mould, sand, and 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

quiet bays chosen by the old settlers often are to be seen some 500 feet from the shore, imbeds the remains of their villages. It and 8 or 10 feet below low-water mark: was so at Meilen, where the first dis- among them lie some of the old timbers, covery of them was made in excavating and a dug-out canoe was to be seen halfthe deep mud-flats; and in other places, buried in the mud. If the townspeople

where the deposit is shallower, the dredg- would only build there a group of fishering-machine travelling over the muddy bot- men's huts on piles, such as actually stood tom of the lakes still brings up remains in in the last century in the Limnat which great quantities, though unfortunately much flows into the Lake of Zürich, we should damaged in the process. On such ground have the old Morges settlement at once rethe antiquary works with gentler means, stored to something of its pristine appeardragging a toothed scraper from his boat

ance.

and bringing up the mud in scoops. Where In these old hut-platforms we see before

1

LAKE DWELLINGS.

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 cross to their outbuildings on pile-bridges, ancient builders constructing themselves It is out in wider lakes that we find the 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 bore 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 Bielerin Switzerswampy Moosseedorf, near Berne, appear see, which lies seven or eight feet under to have made their communication with the water, covering two or three acres of shore by a road of piled faggots whose ground; and the piles are still to be seen trace is still marked by the remains of cross projecting from it. Of course such a vast branches lying in the peat. But they some- structure as this could not pass unnoticed; times carried out the same idea scale, and this in early Stone Age times. and till Swiss antiquaries became alive to on a large but Roman remains are found not far off, At Niederwyl, near Frauenfeld, there have the existence of their ancient lake-men, 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 an- which form the great mound are waterswered here, for the piles would have given worn boulders of quartz and granite, sideways, or quite sunk in the soft, swampy brought with great labour from the heights ground, under the heavy pressure of the above Nidau, while at St. Peter's Island, a

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.

these piles were thought to belong to some
Roman work.
immense Bronze-Age settlement, full of
But the
the most interesting remains. The stones
place is, in fact, an

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 contains in vast quantities the relics of an another steinberg, that of Marin, which Iron-Age settlement: such as above fifty iron swords, some with their sheaths, iron lance-heads, clasps in profusion, and even a linch-pin and a couple of snaffle-bits. hatchets and

shield-plates,

island the builders framed a solid structure On this artificial 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 we pass naturally to the stockaded islands From such Swiss constructions as these representation of what the ordinary plat- of Scotland. The crannogs proper, as Mr. form on piles would have looked like. Stuart calls them in The thick earthen floor, laid to keep out to Mr. Lee's work, combine in a very curihis account contributed the damp, was still there, and even the ous way both the Swiss types, the fascinevery hearth-stones were in their places on island, and the steinberg. A double enthe ground-floor of the huts as when they closure of piles of young oak-trees was set were deserted. These fascine-settlements up in the lake-bed; the outer palisade to were not so common as those supported on serve as breakwater and fortification, the piles; in fact, though suited to the peculiar inner to form the wall of the artificial island, circumstances of they would not have stood ag a small and swampy pool, which was made by sinking logs in the bed against the of the lake, and heaping on the wood a

mass of earth and stones. But the group of crannogs of Loch Dowalton in Wigtonshire, when left exposed by the drainage of the lake, proved to be even more exactly like the fascine-islands of Niederwyl and Wauwyl, for their surface of stones rested on layers of brushwood, logs, and stones, down to the lowest stratum of fern spread on the bottom of the loch. In Ireland and Scotland together there are near a hundred crannogs known, but in the Irish ones it was usual to take advantage of a natural island, and to complete it by palisades and heaps of stones, into a strong and habitable

fortress.

What were the motives that have induced men in so many different places to go out and build their damp and inconvenient abodes in lakes? It is obvious that the main reason which accounts for the existence of houses on piles all over the world does not hold here. The ancient Swiss were not driven by floods to build their huts on high scaffolds, like the Guaranis of the Orinoco, whose fires Sir Walter Raleigh saw gleam

and kill their bears and eat them. The enemies against whom the lake settlements were built as fastnesses were not bears, but men.

Though the arts of fortification and siege have now taken up means so much more effective than in past times, we can see that in old days such fortresses as the 'Moat' at Eyteham, which was built in Edward the Second's time, with its walls rising sheer from the water, or Leeds Castle, on its three little lake islands joined by draw-bridges, must have been places of great strength. So the stockaded islands of the Irish lakes were the ordinary strongholds of the country from old up to almost modern times. Thus, to quote but one of many records, even in 1567 the official report of one Thomas Phettiplace describes O'Neil as not trusting to his castles for safety, for 'that fortification which he only dependeth upon is in sartin ffreshwater loghes in his country, which from the sea there come neither ship nor boat to approach them, which

islands hath in wars to fore been attempted,

ing high up among the trees, or like the and now of late again by the Lord Deputy Burmese, through whose hamlets the trav- there, Sir Harry Sydney, which, for want eller in the rainy season passes in his boat. of means for safe conduct upon the water it Again, it was held for years, and by some hath not prevailed.' Convenience of fishof the ablest Swiss archæologists, that fear ing and boating has, no doubt, in some of wild beasts was one reason which drove cases induced people to build houses in the the old inhabitants to live out in the lake; water; but, on the whole, the evidence as but the notion is untenable.* The lake- to lake settlements converges to the opinion dwellers belong to a comparatively recent that safety from enemies was their main period in Europe; the mammoth, the cave- motive. Captain Burton's Iso took to the tiger, and the hyæna, were no longer in the lagoon to be safe from the King of Dahome. land, as in the days of the earlier and ruder Even in 1810, the Dutch in the East Indies cave-men. Their wild beasts were only the were hard put to it to suppress the rebellion bear, the wolf, and the fox, though no doubt of the native lake-town of Tondano; they the country swarmed with these. But the were obliged to build boats to carry cannon notion of people living in the water to be to reduce the place; and, having succeeded, out of the way of bears or wolves, is an they never allowed so dangerous a fastness undeserved slur upon the lowest savage. to be rebuilt. How strong the ancient A bear is, indeed, an ugly antagonist, especially to hunters whose best weapons are but stone-pointed spears and arrows; yet though savages may shrink from even mentioning his dreaded name, call him 'Grandpapa' to propitiate him, ask pardon of his dead carcase, or even put the pipe of peace into his mouth to engage it to take no vengeance, nevertheless between hunger and hatred they get the better of their fears,

* We should have roundly asserted such a thing to be out of the question anywhere, had it not been for recollecting a remark one Gasparo Balbi, a Venetian jeweller, who was in Pegu în 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 the pile-dwellings of Lake Maracaybo in South America, the remarkable statement has been made that the Indians resort to this aquatic life to escape the mosquitoes, which infest the shores.

Prasian pile-villages were, comes out very curiously in a remark of Herodotus, who mentions in quite an incidental way that when Darius sent his General Megabyzus to carry off the Pæonians, he reached Lake Prasias, but the dwellers in the lake settlements there were among the tribes whom he failed to subdue.

Thus, too, security from attack was clearly the motive of the Swiss lake-men of Robenhausen in driving their herds to stables in the lake, along along a mile or more of pier from the pasture-lands of Kempten. Against enemies assailing them with spears and arrows from boats and rafts at a distance, and from storming parties clambering up their scaffolds, their position was very strong. But it would be interesting to ascertain whether, like so many savage 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 the conflagrations, which we know so often devastated the settlements built with such painful perseverance, were frequently the work of hostile hands. M. Le Hon, instead of reproducing Dr. Keller's ideal restoration of a Swiss lake village in peaceful occupation, has chosen for a 'sensational' frontispiece to his work on 'Fossil Man' the moment of conflagration in the midst

a

gigantic beavers, and pointing in confirmation to the supposed remains of their dams still standing in the water. Unless a tradition of lake settlements can be proved to have existed before 1853, the time when the news of the discovered lake dwellings spread throughout Switzerland, we must continue to believe that they were utterly forgotten up to the time when the antiquaries succeeded in re-constructiug something of their annals. These at least touch history at their nearer end, for the latest IronAge villages come down to the GalloRoman period. Backward from this they extend, we know not how far, into a dark and distant past. Their race, and the dates 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 his

of a raging tempest, with the wretched natives plunging headlong into the lake, or escaping in their canoes. On the whole, we prefer the quieter pictures, which show the natives at their every-day work, fishing, paddling in dug-out canoes, or hanging out their nets. Such drawings give great of their occupation, cannot yet be made

tory of their culture. It will be best to give a brief account of this interesting series of facts and arguments, before concluding with such few and doubting remarks as may be made on their place among European tribes, and their date in the calendar

circular huts which are still sometimes represented. M. Troyon cleverly calculated the shape and size of these supposed circular huts, from the curvature of the bits of clay-plastering which had fallen into the water, baked to brick when the wattled 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 im

platform-space acquired with such enormous labour, by building circular huts on it instead of the oblong ones usual elsewhere, and of which remains are actually found at Niederwyl.

We have seen that many lake settlements, such as those now actually inhabited in the Eastern Archipelago or in Dahome, the mediæval ones of Ireland or Syria, and the more ancient ones still of Lake Prasias, come within the range of written history. But no history mentions the Swiss lake dwellings; they were utterly forgotten by the people who have since lived on the

portant fact that the history of the Swiss lake-dwellers is the history of a gradual development in civilisation. They make their first appearance as thoroughly in the Stone-Age as the South Sea Islanders who planted the iron nails in expectation of reaping a crop of these valuable vegetables. At Wangen, or Moosseedorf, or the fascine platform of Wauwyl, there has not been found among the thousands of stone hatchets, knives, and arrow-heads, any trace of metal. They must have lived for many centuries in such places as these, with only 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 hey embody, as this does, dle, and at Moosseedorf the little jagged the results of modern scientific opinion. Istone saw was picked up in the worm-eaten

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