Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 35.djvu/527

Rh The relics of the Stone age in Sweden, and incidentally in Scandinavia generally, are described, and the testimony they give to the kind of life the people lived is set forth in the first part of Dr. Oscar Montelius's "Civilization of Sweden in Heathen Times" (London and New York, Macmillan & Co.), from which, and the Rev. F. Woods's introduction, the facts and illustrations in this article are derived. Our only clew to the antiquity of human settlement in Scandinavia is derived from the evidence afforded by certain finds of a habitation of some southern parts of the region by a people of the Stone age at a time when firs were still the prevailing trees there. Since then the forests of fir-trees have died out and made way for great forests of oaks, "which covered the land till they in their turn succumbed to the now prevailing beech woods."



Traces of population at a somewhat later but still very early date are found in the "kitchen-middens"—enormous collections of shells, with bones, bearing marks of having been eaten from, and remains of fireplaces and instruments—which are scattered along the sea-coasts.



The tools with which the Northmen during the Stone age produced their wooden works, and which are found at their old resorts, were mainly knives, saws, borers, chisels, and axes or hatchets. They were made out of flint, chipped into shape by