Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/409

] daggers, or lances. The introduction of personal ornaments, and especially of glass, probably of Egyptian or Phœnician manufacture, before other articles, which may be presumed to have been used in the country where glass was manufactured, is what might have been anticipated from the past experience of the contact of peoples in different stages of civilisation. At the present time, the natives of Africa prefer articles which minister to their vanity to those of practical use, and glass beads are used as a medium of exchange by the traders, and pass from hand to hand into regions far beyond those into which our weapons and implements penetrate. This "period of transition" of M. Chantre is the necessary result of the intercourse of the inhabitants of France and Switzerland, at the close of the Neolithic age, with the civilised peoples south of the Alps, and it may be taken to be merely the first sign of their influence, subsequently to be felt in "the age of Bronze, properly so called."

From M. Chantre's observations it is evident that in France, as in Britain, cremation was practised side by side with inhumation.

The association of Neolithic implements with bronze articles is equally noticeable in some of the pile-dwellings of the Swiss and French lakes, and there is ample proof that the principal result of the introduction of bronze into those regions was the improvement of the civilisation which had existed long before.

The pile-dwellings of France and Switzerland, such more particularly as those in the lakes of Bourget,