No. 1278.-November 28, 1868.

1. LAKE DWELLINGS,

CONTENTS.

Quarterly Review, .

515

2. MADAME THERESE. Part IV., and last. From the French of Erckmann-Chatrian, 528 3. THE COUNTRY-HOUSE ON THE RHINE. Part II. By Berthold Auerbach. Translated from the German for the "Living Age,"

4. A COURT BALL IN MEXICO, 5. CONTINENTAL RAILWAYS,

6. THE JOHNSON CLUB,

7. CAPT. MONCRIEFF'S IMPORTANT ARTILLERY INVEN

Die Presse,
The Overland,

543 551

Athenæum,

⚫ 552

POETRY.

514 THE UNFINISHED PRAYER,
514

514

527 THE ADJECTIVE HOMEOPATHIC,
527

SHORT ARTICLES.

NEW BOOKS:

A BOOK ABOUT BOYS. By A. R. HOPE. Roberts Brothers, Boston.

LITTLE WOMEN, OR MEG, JO, BETH, AND AMY. By LOUISA M. ALCOTT.
by MARY ALCOTT. Roberts Brothers, Boston.

RUBY'S HUSBAND. By MARION HARLAND. Sheldon & Co., New York.
RURAL POEMS. By WILLIAM BARNES. Roberts Brothers, Boston.

PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY

LITTELL & GAY,

& GAY, BOSTON.

Illustrrted

TERMS OF

SUBSCRIPTION.

FOR EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for warded for a year, free of postage. But we do not prepay postage on less than a year, nor where we have to pay commission for forwarding the money.

Price of the First Series, in Cloth, 36 volumes, 90 dollars.

Any Volume Bound, 3 dollars; Unbound, 2 dollars. The sets, or volumes, will be sent at the expense of the publishers.

PREMIUMS FOR CLUBS.

For 5 new subscribers ($40.), a sixth copy; or a set of HORNE'S INTRODUCTION TO THE BIBLE, unabridged, in 4 large volumes, cloth, price $10; or any 5 of the back volumes of the LIVING AGE, in numbers, price $10.

From The Quarterly Review. the careful shepherds on little carriages, to 1. The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and protect them from being wounded by dragother Parts of Europe. By Dr. Ferdi- ging on the rough ground; yet, allowing nand Keller, President of the Antiqua- for some extravagance in the dimensions rian Association of Zürich. Trans- of the tails, we all know there are such lated and arranged by John Edward Lee. London, 1866.

breeds. So his stories of the Scythians killing and eating their sick and aged relatives has been questioned; but ethnologists are well aware that modern tribes have been found practising such horrors, though, like these Scythians, rather in kindness than in cruelty. And among other curious accounts recorded by the Father of History, his matter-of-fact description of certain people of Lake Prasias, in Thrace, in the 6th century B.C., has been treated as imaginary. The houses of these people, he tells us, were built on planks on piles out mains in the Turbaries and Marl-Beds in the lake, with a narrow bridge to conof Northern and Central Italy. By Bartolomeo Gastaldi. Translated and nect them with the shore. The platforms Edited by Charles Harcourt Cham- were at first set up by the citizens working bers, M.A., &c. Published for the in common; but afterwards it became a Anthropological Society of London.

2. L'Homme Fossile en Europe. Par H.
Le Hon. Brussels, 1867.

3. Pre-Historic Times; as illustrated by
Ancient Remains, and the Manners and
Customs of Modern Savages. By John
Lubbock, .F.R.S. London, 1865.

4. The Geological Evidences of the An-
tiquity of Man; with Remarks on
Theories of the Origin of Species by
Variation. By Sir Charles Lyell,
F.R.S. 3rd Edition, revised. Lon-
don, 1863.

5. Lake Habitations and Pre-Historic Re

1865.

rule that every man should drive three new piles for each wife he married, they having many wives. Each man had his own hut, with its trap-door over the lake; and they tied the babies by the foot with a cord, to prevent their rolling into the water. They gave the horses and cattle fish for food, which was so plentiful that a man had only to let down his trap-door and lower a basket (probably a wicker fish-trap) into the water, and in a short time he would draw it up full of fish.*

THERE are few readier means of attacking the testimony of an old traveller or historian than to point out that he tells improbable stories: things not perhaps physically impossible, but unfamiliar to the critic's experience, and therefore not set down by him in the catalogue of likely incidents. This kind of criticism, however, Now, so far from its being impossible has the serious fault of going hand-in-hand that people should choose such a mode of

with ignorance. The less the critic knows life as this, they have again and again been of the world, the more things, of course, found living so. There is a record by seem unlikely to him; and in the long run Abulfeda, the Syrian geographer, of Chrishis assault is apt to strengthen the very tian fishermen living in the thirteenth cenevidence it was directed against. It comes tury in wooden huts built on piles in one out that what the old writer asserted does of the Apamean lakes on the Orontes. unquestionably happen somewhere else, and The pile-huts of the Papuans of New his credit at once stands higher than ever; Guinea were described and drawn, some the unbelieving critic is laughed at, and forty years ago, by Dumont d'Urville, and public opinion turns, by a natural reaction, they are still inhabited. Mr. A. R. Waltowards the belief that everything an old lace, the naturalist, lived for days in one book says must be true unless it be proved of their quaint water-villages, with their false. The argument from improbability floors supported on piles carved into rude has in this way been brought to bear against human figures seeming to stand upon the

Herodotus, with the effect on the whole of strengthening our confidence in him. Thus fault has been found with his account of the broad-tailed sheep, with their tails fixed by

water - rows of grotesque and somewhat disagreeable savage Caryatides. Still later, Captain Burton mentions a visit to an African * Herodotus, v. 16.

tribe, the Iso, who, during some forgotten | such words will do, some mutilated tradiwar, fled from Dahome and established tion of this earliest local nomenclature. themselves in a lagoon marked in our In lakes of North Italy and Germany simicharts as the Denham waters:

The Dahoman king is sworn never to lead his army where canoes may be required; these Iso, therefore, have built their huts upon tall poles, about a mile distant from the shore. Their villages at once suggest the Prasian lake

lar discoveries have since been made, and the crannoges of the Irish and Scotch lakes have been not indeed freshly discovered, but examined by antiquaries with new care, as belonging to the now interesting class of lacustrine works. Had it not been for a

dwellings of Herodotus, and the crannoges of loss lately sustained by ethnological sciIreland and the Swiss waters. The people are ence, we might perhaps at this moment essentially boatmen; they avoid dry land as have been testing the truth of Herodotus's much as possible, and though said to be fero-account of the Pæonian lake-dwellers by cious, they are civil enough to strangers. In commenting on actual specimens of their June, 1863, I moored my little canoe under one huts, their weapons, and their fishing imof their huts, and I well remember the gro- plements. With the aid of Sir John Lubtesque sensation of hearing children, dogs, pigs, and poultry actively engaged aloft.' *

bock, and others interested in such inquiries, Professor von Morlot, a zealous Swiss archæologist, was in the midst of arranging an expedition into Roumelia to dredge in Lake Prasias, when he died, leaving in his will

remains may be reasonably expected to be still lying there in situ; and it is to be hoped that some properly qualified traveller may ere long carry out the curious research so unhappily interrupted.

But the habits of such aquatic tribes, ancient or modern, would have attracted little attention, had it not been for a course of discoveries made within the last few a characteristic bequest to science - his years, which have given to the lake-dwellers own skull to be set up as a specimen. If a prominent place in what we may venture the Prasian lake-men ever existed, their to call the pre-historic history of Europe. The Lake of Zürich happened to be unusually low at the end of 1853; the inhabitants near by took advantage of the favourable moment, walled in plots of low land, and set to work to raise this into useful ground by bringing mud from the flats now left bare by the Lake. In excavating this mud, the workmen were astonished to find themselves standing among the piles of an ancient lake settlement, with the implements and rubbish of the old inhabitants still lying round them. Before long the Swiss antiquaries had explored the margins of other lakes, and had proved that the old description of Herodotus was typical of the life of early Swiss tribes, whose hundreds of water villages had once

Until lately, the only systematic book devoted to lake dwellings was that of M. Troyon, an early and successful investigator, but who wrote with a certain poetic license suited to a young science, of then but seven years' growth, rather than with the more rigid strictness of argument into which the subject has now settled down after seven years more. Dr. Keller, of Zürich, is perhaps the leading authority on lacustrine matters; and now that Mr. Lee has collected and edited his papers in an excellent English translation, this volume

fringed the shore-line, where the water was must become the main work of reference not too deep nor the ground too hard for for archæologists; while less special readpile-driving. In fact, the great blank ers, who avoid elaborate details of antispaces that stand for inland waters in the quarian 'finds,' will yet read with pleasure Swiss maps would have been encroached and profit the general essays on the manner on in a more ancient survey by a bordering of life and place in history of dwellers in of lake settlements, whose names no geographer is now ever likely to restore, though perchance the names of adjoining villages on the shore may still keep up, as

the lakes.

The habits of these people are known with wonderful accuracy; their houses, their agricultural and pastoral pursuits, their manufactures, and even their bartering commerce with foreign lands, are

vouched for by good evidence; and yet, in three acres in extent. Not far across the spite of all this, it is utterly unknown what moor we come among places where the manner of men they were in body, what piles are standing by scores in little sheets their language and their laws may have of water. When these piles were driven been like, what they believed, and what they were in the lake itself, a mile or so they worshipped. We are left to judge of from the shore, and only connected with their mental and moral condition as best it by a long pier, also on piles; but since we may, by comparing them with recent then, in the course of ages, the peat has races whose material life stands near the encroached upon the water and pushed same level. For this purpose an excellent back the lake to a sheet of half its former manual is available, scientific in matter and extent, standing in the middle of its earlier popular in expression. In Sir John Lub-basin. In these spots, however, where the bock's 'Pre-historic Times,' the lake-dwell-excavators have cut through the thin layer ers are not drawn in an isolated sketch, but set in their proper niche among tribes of culture more or less resembling their own men of the Stone and Bronze Ages and the entrance of the Iron Age, the cavedwellers* and the men of the Scandinavian shell-heaps, the mound-builders of America, and more modern savage tribes taken in a general view.

It need hardly be said that descriptions and drawings, and the rows of flint-flakes and potsherds in museums, cannot give to these old tribes the touch of real human interest that is gained by exploring the very places where they lived. The Swiss lake-dwellers were but savages in wooden huts; but we can stand among stumps of rude posts in a mud-bank or a peat-bog, and shape to ourselves the liveliest pictures of their homes and habits. What impressions these strange old sites leave on the minds of observers may perhaps be judged from the following notes of a recent visit to the place of one of the most remarkable lake-towns in Switzerland.

On the railway between Zürich and Chur there is a little station called Wetzikon, in a lowland country backed by the Glarus mountains, but itself only saved from flatness by the undulating hills of Molasse' near by. A short drive through the village of Stegen ends in a wide stretch of peat-moor, with the swampy little lake of Pfäffikon in sight a few hundred yards further on. This is Robenhausen, the site of a lake settlement of the Stone Age, some

of mould which now overlies the moor, and have then removed a couple of yards or so of peat, and the water has flowed in and filled the excavated space to half its depth, things have been restored to something like their original condition, and the piles again stand in water as they used to do before the deserted village was finally left to be embedded in the growing peat. Piles that have lately been drawn out lie about in heaps. They are posts made of whole trunks of young firs, not even barked when they were set up, though the bark has now often gone; they look fresh and almost new, and though the wood is rotten, the end of each pile, rudely sharpened for driving deep into the mud, still shows every scoop of the stone hatchet with which it was painfully hacked to a point. But this can only be seen while the piles are fresh, for when taken away to be put in collections they have the troublesome habit of shrinking to a sixth of their size while drying, and this they do in a curious way: first there appears a crack lengthwise, which opens out day by day into a wide split down to the centre, till the sides of the wound at last fold back towards each other, like a book opened in the middle and turned back more than wide-open. In this state they are distorted out of all knowledge, so that the way to keep the impression of the tool-marks is to take a plaster-cast from the pile while it is still wet.