Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/411

] Switzerland, of broken implements and articles collected together for the purpose of being worked up by the bronze-smiths. In both these cases the articles were in use simultaneously, and their association offers us a standard of comparison by which the age of isolated finds may be ascertained.

In both these, as well as in the pile-dwellings of the early Bronze age, the plain wedge-axe is conspicuous by its absence, while all the other articles are of a higher and better kind than those which belong to that age.

The most important of the hoards of merchandise found in France is that discovered at Réallon, after a violent storm had devastated the district. The waters of a stream traversing a little village of that name had hollowed out a new channel for itself, and most of the antiquities were discovered by the villagers in the earth, deposited at a little distance away. They ultimately were purchased for the museum at St. Ger- main, together with those which M. Chantre was able to discover subsequently, representing altogether no less than 461 bronze articles, comprising knives, sickles, lance-heads, horse-bits, rings, buttons, pendants, and bracelets. With them were several small stone rings, a bead of amber, and two of blue glass. The position of Réallon is on a route which has been frequented for a long time, leading from the valley of the Durance to that of the Drac; and it was, M. Chantre remarks, probably that taken by travellers coming from primitive Etruria, from whom the inhabitants of the lake-dwellings "received beyond a doubt the