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Rh. From it we should learn by what means and in what way the men of prehistoric times came into possession of their food-stuffs; and this would be a long story full of deeds and full of suffering. Fortunately, we possess other original documents besides the annals of history; documents, too, that antedate all written history, and which are no less trustworthy and unambiguous. The ground under our feet has preserved them in its strata; they rest in barrows and in caves, and in the bottom of lakes and bogs, and these primitive documents are not silent as to the food of extinct nations.

In the present status of research, the earliest authentic traces of man on earth go no further back than the age of ice, so called, and the accompanying or subsequent formation of the diluvium or drift. The relics of man dating from an earlier epoch, the upper Miocene formation, that is, the middle of the Tertiary group, which are said to have been found in France, are at least very questionable. But there have been preserved for us in caverns remains dating from the Ice Age, which tell us of the food used by man in those times. Man then inhabited Central Europe in company with the reindeer, the cave-bear, and the mammoth. He was exclusively a hunter and fisher, as is shown by the bones of animals found in his cave-dwellings. The miocene vegetation, which abounded in arboreal fruits, had disappeared during the long period of the subsequent pliocene formations, the climate of Central Europe, meanwhile, having gradually become colder. Nature supplied no fruits for the food of man. What food he got by hunting and fishing was precarious, and there were intervals of famine; for fortune does not always smile on the hunter, and the beasts of the forest are not always equally numerous. The food, too, was uniform, and not altogether adapted for man, for the flesh of wild animals lacks fat. The man of those times had not enough of the heat-producers in his food; and that he felt this want, we learn from his taste for the marrow of bones. All the long bones of animals that are found in cave-dwellings are cracked open lengthwise, in order to get out the marrow. Now, this insufficient, uniform food has its counterpart, in the low grade of culture which then prevailed, as evidenced by the mode of life, the weapons, and the tools. Man then lived isolated, without social organization; he dwelt in caverns, and his only protection against the cold was the skins of animals and the fire on the hearth. His tools were of stone, unpolished, unadorned; so rudely fashioned, that only the eye of the connoisseur can recognize in them man's handiwork.

Let us now advance a step further, and glance at a time a few thousand years nearer to our own, the period of the ancient pile-dwellings. Man then built up huts, and even villages, on piles, in the midst of lakes. These piles have been discovered, and between them, on the bed of the lake, oftentimes overlaid with peat several feet in depth, lie the monuments of those times—the waste of the house and