Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/574

 Yorkshire. It is, however, worthy of remark that it is only in the exceptional cases in which the body is turned into adipocere (an unctuous, waxy substance), that woolen cloth is found; in normal circumstances that fabric would disappear far more rapidly than linen.

The bronze remains found in the Rhône Valley prove that the art of metal-working, once acquired, was carried by these early races to great perfection. They were acquainted with the processes of casting, tempering, stamping, and engraving metal. With this discovery of a new art came a simultaneous improvement in the potter's craft; the rude cups of the Neolithic age disappear, and are succeeded by vessels of an endless variety of form and ornamentation, some of which are extremely beautiful. Some of the vases are inlaid with tin, others are marked with the same patterns employed to decorate the Etruscan vases of Italy; while others, found in the pile-dwellings of the Lake of Bourget, have representations of men and animals. The collections of bronze jewelry are also abundant and curious. They consist of bracelets, armlets, long hairpins with decorated heads, rings, ear-rings, girdles adorned with pendants, brooches, buttons, studs and torques for the neck. War being in these early days as common as it appears to be in more modern times, we find well-stored armories, comprising battle-axes, arrows, and clubs, lances and short swords, as also helmets and shields of thin plates of hammered bronze. Their graves resemble those of their Neolithic predecessors, with one important difference—dead bodies were burned as a rule instead of buried, the ashes, inclosed in urns, being placed in the tombs.

In the lake-dwellings of eastern Switzerland the implements found are of bone and stone; but in those of western Switzerland there are rich accumulations of bronze implements and utensils; while in the upper layers of débris iron begins to appear; showing how in its turn the bronze was supplanted by a metal still more universally useful, and destined to be the type of a grand era of enlightenment and progress. Almost as interesting and instructive as the lake-dwellings of Switzerland are the Danish kitchen-middens or shell-mounds, refuse-heaps which have accumulated round the tents or huts of the primitive population. Many of these have been examined; and rude flasks, sling-stones, axes, flint fragments, and the bones of various animals, have been obtained from them.

In primeval times, many animals were abundant in our own country and all over Europe, which seem gradually to have disappeared. Some of these enumerated by Sir John Lubbock are the cave-bear, the cave-hyena, the cave-lion, the mammoth, the woolly-haired rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, the musk-ox, the Irish elk, the wild-horse, the glutton, the reindeer, the auroch, and the urus or wild-ox. Simultaneously with these or with some of these were human beings, who harbored in caves, and whose skeletons are found in caverns mixed up with the bones of these animals, and with stone or bronze implements.