Page:Natural History Review (1862).djvu/41

30, 68 villages, belonging to the Bronze Age, have been discovered in Western Switzerland, and by the same process of reasoning they may be supposed to have contained 42,500 persons; while for the preceding epoch, the population may, in the same manner, be estimated at 31,875.

For a moment it may surprise us that a people so uncivilised should have constructed their dwellings with immense labour on the water, when it would have been so much more easy to have built them on dry land. The first settlers in Switzerland, howeyer, had to contend with the Boar, the Wolf, the Bear, and the Urus; and subsequently, when the population increased, and disputes arose, the lake habitations, no doubt, acted aa a fortification, and protected man from man, as they had before preserved him from wild beasts.

Switzerland is not, by any means, the only country in which lake dwellings have been used as fortresses. In Ireland, a number of more or less artificial islands, called "Crannoges," are known historically, to have been used as strongholds by the petty chiefs. They are composed of earth and stones, strengthened by numerous piles, and have supplied the Irish Archæologists with numerous weapons and bones. From the Crannoge at Dunshauglin, indeed, more than 150 cart-loads of bones were obtained, and were used as manure! These lake dwellings of Ireland, however, come down to a much later period than those of Switzerland, and are frequently mentioned in early history. Thus, according to Shirley, "One Thomas Phelliplaoe, in his answer to an inquiry from the Government, as to what castles or forts O'Neil hath, and of what strength they be, states (May 18, 1567): 'For castles, I think it be not unknown unto your honors, he trusteth no point thereunto for his safety, as appeareth by the raising of the strongest castles of all his countreys, and that fortification that 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: it is thought that there in the said fortified islands lyeth all his plate, which is much, and money, prisoners and gages: which islands, hath in wars to fore been attempted, and now of late again by the Lord Deputy there, Sir Harry Sydney, which for want of means for safe conducts upon the water it hath not prevailed.' "

Agsin, the map of the escheated territories, made for the Government, A.D. 1591, by Francis Jobson, or the "Platt of the County of Monaghan," preserved in the State Paper Office, contains rough sketches of the dwellings of the petty chiefs of Monaghan, which "are in all cases surrounded by water." In the "Annals of the Four Masters," and other records of early Irish history, we meet with numerous instances in which the Crannoges are mentioned, and some in which their position has not preserved them from robbery and