, laying bare
considerable portions of its bed. The adjoining proprietors proceeded
to enclose the new land, and began by erecting permanent dykes to
prevent the return of the waters. While carrying on the works, several
rows of stakes were exposed; and on digging down, the labourers turned
up a number of pieces of charred wood, stones blackened by fire,
utensils, bones, and other articles, showing that at some remote
period, a number of human beings had lived over the spot, in dwellings
supported by stakes driven into the bed of the lake.

The discovery having attracted attention, explorations were made at
other places, and it was shortly found that there was scarcely a lake
in Switzerland which did not yield similar evidence of the existence of
an ancient Lacustrine or Lake-dwelling population. Numbers of their
tools and implements were brought to light--stone axes and saws, flint
arrowheads, bone needles, and such like--mixed with the bones of wild
animals slain in the chase; pieces of old boats, portions of twisted
branches, bark, and rough planking, of which their dwellings had been
formed, the latter still bearing the marks of the rude tools by which
they had been laboriously cut. In the most ancient, or lowest series
of deposits, no traces of metal, either of bronze or iron, were
discovered; and it is most probable that these lake-dwellers lived in
as primitive a state as the South Sea islanders discovered by Captain
Cook, and that the huts over the water in which they lived resembled
those found in Papua and Borneo, and the islands of the Salomon group,
to this day.

These aboriginal Swiss lake-dwellers seem to have been succeeded by a
race of men using tools, implements, and ornaments of bronze. In some
places the remains of this bronze period directly overlay those of the
stone period, showing the latter to have been the most ancient; but in
others, the village sites are altogether distinct. The articles with
which the metal implements are intermixed, show that considerable
progress had been made in the useful arts. The potter's wheel had been
introduced. Agriculture had begun, and wild animals had given place to
tame ones. The abundance of bronze also shows that commerce must have
existed to a certain extent; for tin, which enters into its
composition, is a comparatively rare metal, and must necessarily have
been imported from other European countries.

The Swiss antiquarians are of opinion that t