Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/527

Rh blond long-head (or supposed Aryan) race; or that the people of the Swiss pile-dwellings belonged to that race. The long-heads among them may just as likely have been brunets. In northeastern Italy there is clear evidence of the superposition of at least four stages of culture, in which that of the copper and bronze using terramare people comes second; a stage marked by Etruscan domination occupies the third place; and that is followed by the stage which appertains to the Gauls, with their long swords and other characteristic iron-work. In western Switzerland, on the other hand, at La Téne, and elsewhere, similar relics show that the Gauls followed upon the latest population of the pile-dwellings among whom traces of Etruscan influence (though not of dominion) are to be found. Helbig supposes the terramare people to have been Greco-Latin-speaking Pelasgi, and consequently Aryan. But we can not suppose the people of the pile-dwellings of Switzerland to have been speakers of primitive Greco-Latin (if ever there was such a language). And if the Gauls were the first speakers of Celtic who got into Switzerland, what Aryan language can the people of the pile-dwellings have spoken?

As I have already mentioned, there is not the least doubt that man existed in northwestern Europe during the Pleistocene or Quaternary epoch. It is not only certain that men were contemporaries of the mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, the reindeer, the cave bear, and other great carnivora, in England and in France, but a great deal has been ascertained about the modes of life of our predecessors. They were savage hunters, who took advantage of such natural shelters as overhanging rocks and caves, and perhaps built themselves rough wigwams; but who had no domestic animals, and have left no sign that they cultivated plants. In many localities there is evidence that a very considerable interval—the so-called hiatus—intervened between the time when the Quaternary or palæolithic men occupied particular caves and river basins and the accumulation of the débris left by their neolithic successors. And, in spite of all the warnings against negative evidence afforded by the history of geology, some have very positively asserted that this means a complete break between the Quaternary and the Recent populations—that the Quaternary population followed the retreating ice northward and left behind them a desert which remained unpeopled for ages. Other high authorities, on the contrary, maintain that the races of men who now inhabit Europe may all be traced back to the