Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/39

Rh of the most ancient of the lake-dwellings, hatchets of serpentine and greenstone, and arrow-heads of quartz, have been met with. Here also remains of a kind of cloth, supposed to be of flax, not woven but plaited, have been detected. Professor Heer has recognised lumps of carbonized wheat, Triticum vulgare, and grains of another kind, T. dicoccum, and barley, Hordeum distichon, and flat round cakes of bread, showing clearly that in the stone period the lake-dwellers cultivated all these cereals, besides having domesticated the dog, the ox, the sheep, and the goat.

Carbonized apples and pears of small size, such as still grow in the Swiss forests, stones of the wild plum, seeds of the raspberry and blackberry, and beech-nuts, also occur in the mud, and hazel-nuts in great plenty.

Near Morges, on the Lake of Geneva, a settlement of the bronze period, no less than forty hatchets of that metal have been dredged up, and in many other localities the number and variety of weapons and utensils discovered, in a fine state of preservation, is truly astonishing.

It is remarkable that as yet all the settlements of the bronze period are confined to Western and Central Switzerland. In the more eastern lakes those of the stone period alone have as yet been discovered.

The tools, ornaments, and pottery of the bronze period in Switzerland bear a close resemblance to those of corresponding age in Denmark, attesting the wide spread of a uniform civilization over Central Europe at that era. In some few of the aquatic stations, as well as in tumuli and battlefields in Switzerland, a mixture of bronze and iron implements and works of art have been observed, including coins and medals of bronze and silver, struck at Marseilles, and of Greek manufacture, belonging to the first and pre-Roman division of the age of iron.

In the settlements of the bronze era the wooden piles are