Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/601

Rh then, in strata above these, sealed in the stalagmite of the cavern floors, lying with the bones of extinct animals, some of them more recent, stone implements were found, still rude, but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of man has been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of the world, as a rule, upward.

But this rule was to be much further exemplified. About 1850, while the French and English geologists were working more especially among the relics of the drift and cave periods, noted archæologists of the North, Forchammer, Steenstrup, and Worsaae, were devoting themselves to the investigation of certain remains upon the Danish Peninsula. These remains were of two kinds: first, there were vast shell-heaps or accumulations of shells and other refuse cast aside by rude tribes which, at some unknown age in the past lived on the shores of the Baltic, principally on shell-fish. That these shell-heaps were very ancient was evident; the shells of oysters and the like found in them were far larger than any now found on those coasts; their size, so far from being like that of the corresponding varieties which now exist in the brackish waters of the Baltic, was in every case like that of those varieties which only thrive in the waters of the open salt sea: here was a clear indication that at the time when man formed these shell-heaps those coasts were in far more direct communication with the salt sea than at present, and that sufficient time must have elapsed since that period to have wrought enormous changes in sea and land throughout those regions.

Scattered through these heaps were found indications of a grade of civilization when man still used implements of stone, but implements and weapons, which, though still rude, showed a progress from those of the drift and early cave period; some of them, indeed, being of polished stone.

With these were other evidences that civilization had progressed. With implements rude enough to have survived from early periods, other implements never known in the drift and bone caves began to appear, and though there were few if any bones of other domestic animals, the remains of dogs were found; everything showed that there had been a progress in civilization between the former and this Stone epoch.

The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made in the peat-beds; these were generally formed in hollows or bowls varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them, like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a