Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/603

Rh But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of this same evolution. As far back as the year 1820 there were discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in the water at some distance from the shore; but the usual mixture of thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have prevailed and nothing was done until about 1853, when new discoveries of the same kind were followed up vigorously, and such men as Rütimeyer, Keller, and Troyon showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics, exhibiting the grade of civilization which those lake-dwellers had attained.

Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tendency of the human race. Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery of various grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of domestic animals, various sorts of grain, bread which had been preserved by charring, and a multitude of evidences of progress never found among the earlier, ruder relics of civilization, showed yet more strongly that man had arrived here at yet a higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave, and shell-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better.

Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in each class of implements: as by comparing the chipped flint implements of the lower and earlier strata in the cave period with those of the latter and upper strata we saw progress, so, in each of the periods of polished stone, bronze, and iron, we see a steady progress from rude to perfected implements; especially is this true in the remains of the various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out constant improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of living.

Incidentally, too, a fact—at first sight of small account, but on reflection exceedingly important—was revealed. The earlier bronze implements were frequently found to imitate in various minor respects implements of stone; in other words, forms were at first given to bronze implements natural in working stone, but not natural in working bronze. This showed the direction of the development—that it was upward from stone to bronze, not