Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/25

Rh Zealand and Madagascar. And there is going on before our eyes the sad spectacle of the extinction of some of the nobler savage races of men, incapable of persistence in life in an age like ours, opposed by the superior forces of European civilization.

From the beginning civilization has spread from the East to the West, and such is still its line of march, as illustrated by the Teutonic race's steady pressure into the ever-receding "far West." So, too, with the people of the pile-dwellings. They probably came from Asia to Europe some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, being doubtless affected, as is every people, by the powerful modifying influences either produced or put in full play by such long and vast migrations. And the people who made the stone axes and the pile-dwellings is probably the same that reared the huge funeral piles known as dolmens. A dolmen consists of two immense blocks of stone placed on end, upon which a third is laid, forming a sort of table. The dead were buried beneath, with various implements and weapons at hand. How a people, without engineering skill and contrivances,-could rear such masses into position, is a problem yet unsolved. They are found in Brittany, Southern France, Great Britain, Portugal, North Africa, Nubia, Palestine, and the East Indies, those of Brittany being the largest.

Thus, instead of the golden age, that fancy represents as lying far back in the race's childhood, we find the dull realities of a long Stone age, during which man endured all and more than all the perils and sufferings of the present.

And yet, for each of us, as years steal over us, the days of our own vanished youth are ever "the good old days."

—The predominance of bronze, as the material of the articles found in the later pile-dwellings, has given to the fourth prehistoric human epoch its name—the Age of Bronze. While some of these lake-villages continued in use from the Stone age, others—usually those farthest out in the lakes—evidently originated in the Age of Bronze.

There is no longer room to doubt that the bronze articles of Switzerland were made near the places of their discovery, and were not brought from the East, according to the common view. Some of the very moulds in which they were formed have been discovered, and at Nantes the remains of a foundery have been plainly made out. Whether the bronzes of Northern Europe are of Phœnician origin is yet in doubt. Their symbolisms and religious adaptations are in favor of that view.