were
living at the epoch when the gravel strata were in process of
formation. If the strata that cover these remains have always been
deposited as slowly as they are today, these men whose bones and tools
we unearth must have lived more than 200,000 years ago.

=The Cave Men.=--Remains are also found in caverns cut in rock, often
above a river. The most noted are those on the banks of the Vezere,
but they exist in many other places. Sometimes they have been used as
habitations and even as graves for men. Skeletons, weapons, and tools
are found here together. There are axes, knives, scrapers,
lance-points of flint; arrows, harpoon-points, needles of bone like
those used by certain savages to this day. The soil is strewn with the
bones of animals which these men, untidy like all savages, threw into
a corner after they had eaten the meat; they even split the bones to
extract the marrow just as savages do now. Among the animals are found
not only the hare, the deer, the ox, the horse, the salmon, but also
the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the mammoth, the elk, the bison, the
reindeer, which are all extinct or have long disappeared from France.
Some designs have been discovered engraved on the bone of a reindeer
or on the tusk of a mammoth. One of these represents a combat of
reindeer; another a mammoth with woolly hide and curved tusks.
Doubtless these men were the contemporaries of the mammoth and the
reindeer. They were, like the Esquimaux of our day, a race of hunters
and fishermen, knowing how to work in flint and to kindle fires.

POLISHED STONE AGE

=Lake Dwellings.=--In 1854, Lake Zurich being very low on account of
the unusual dryness of the summer, dwellers on the shore of the lake
found, in the mud, wooden piles which had been much eaten away, also
some rude utensils. These were the remains of an ancient village built
over the water. Since this time more than 200 similar villages have
been found in the lakes of Switzerland. They have been called Lake
Villages. The piles on which they rest are trunks of trees, pointed
and driven into the lake-bottom to a depth of several yards. Every
village required 30,000 to 40,000 of these.

A wooden platform was supported by the pile work and on this were
built wooden houses covered with turf. Objects found by the hundred
among the piles reveal the character of the life of the former
inhabitants. They ate animals killed in the chase--the deer, the boar,
and the elk. But the