are made (stone, bronze, and iron), just like a bad librarian who classes his books according to their size (folios, quartos, and octavos); but for chronology nothing is gained by this classification.1 This has sometimes been the case in museums. Some years ago in Ireland, weapons of stone and bronze were found in the Shannon; no one noticed, when they were dug out, whether they were intermixed or whether the former were in a deeper and older, the latter in a more recent deposit, because the distinction between a stone and bronze age had not yet then been thought of. In spite of this, an Irish savant afterwards reconstructed a stone age and bronze age out of these materials, and he even hazarded conjectures as to the length of time between these two periods; whereas nobody can make out whether the implements really belong to different periods at all. Other museums have been formed, like that at Dublin, by the gradual collecting of objects, concerning whose discovery in many cases nothing certain is known. It would therefore be very wrong to assign all the stone implements to the stone age. The stone age, as I have shown, can only be said to include those implements which are known to belong to a time in which metals were as yet quite unknown in the regions where they were found, and if a stone age is proved to have existed in any region, this even would not give us any means of ascertaining, even approximately, its date. If I say "in the time of the emperors," this is a very inexact way of fixing a date, unless I add whether I mean the Roman or the German emperors. Just in the same way the stone age may 'Die Pfahlbauten, p. 76. have lasted for centuries longer, or have occurred much later in one country than in another. Some savage peoples may be still living in the stone age. We can trace the use of metals in central and north Europe as far back as a few centuries before Christ. The stone age, or rather the premetallic period, therefore here ends at a time which can only be called prehistoric relatively to the peoples who inhabited these regions. The question when this period began is the same as the question as to when these lands were first peopled, and the stone implements give us no data for answering either. "If we call only those things prehistoric which occurred at a period of which we have no history, we shall get into great difficulties. If we begin history at the time when we have the first contemporary information, we get a very long way back. Egypt and India take us back to such early times that the student of Egyptian or Indian antiquities is much surprised to hear the period just before or even just after the birth of Christ called prehistoric. We do not ask, 'When does history as a whole begin?' but, When does history begin at any one special spot; when does day first break there?' Everything which lies before the dawning of any local history is without doubt prehistoric. The day of history passes just like any ordinary day. Just as the sun moves on, and at one spot on the earth it is still dark, while in another it is already broad daylight,- -so it is with history. When it was broad noon-day over the most favoured countries of the earth, when culture had there reached a high stage of development, and government very complicated forms, there still existed in our land wild, unnamed tribes, of whom no one knew anything, whom no one has described, of whom history says nothing. They are prehistoric. And when we look at the different portions of our great country, when we ask when it was that the lands beyond the Elbe and the Oder were touched by the light of true history when the sun rose there, we shall find that this took place in the tenth and eleventh and even as late as the twelfth century; and we shall be forced to admit that things which are found in Germany, and belong to the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries must, under certain circumstances, be called prehistoric. But if we imagine that only those events must be called prehistoric which occurred at a period when there was no history at all, when Egypt, India, and China did not exist, no doubt the space covered by the prehistoric period is reduced to a very small compass."-See Virchow, Die 6 allg. Versammlung der D. Gesellsch. für Anthr., Munich 1875, p. 12. Sir John Lubbock,' Worsace, and others have divided the stone age into one, two, three, or four periods. Lubbock distinguishes between an ancient and a recent stone age, a palæolithic and a neolithic period. In the first it is supposed that roughly worked stone implements, and in the second polished stone implements, were used. To this Vogt rightly rejoins: "If we are to gather from the way in which the flint implements are worked, from their polishing and grinding, that there were different epochs in the stone age, we may be disregarding the principles of exact and accurate inquiry. No doubt with every step which man makes in comfort, he feels more and more the wish to make his existence beautiful and pleasant. Therefore he would probably take the roughly worked flint axe, and first work and chip out its edge, then grind and polish it, and work the horn with the knife, and he would do this the more diligently the more his situation and the struggle for existence gave him time for such occupation, which at first he might have considered useless. But just as in our present state of civilisation there are many countries in which a man's whole time. is taken up in satisfying the first necessary wants of life, so the same difference must have existed, and was perhaps even more marked, in the earliest times; so that in one place civilisation had progressed, and implements were finely worked, while in a neighbouring region men were still content with the rough form. Is not this shown by the settlements of Concise on the Lake of Neuenburg on the one hand, and those of 1 Prehistoric Times. Cf. Archiv für Anthr. viii. 249. For Worsaee see same, viii. 60. central and eastern Switzerland on the other? If these settlements were situated above one another, if above the rough tools of Robenhausen we found the finely worked implements of Concise, we should unhesitatingly say that here were two different consecutive epochs of civilisation. As it is, these settlements may have existed exactly at the same time, although civilisation seems much more advanced in one than in the other.1 Others have asserted that the fact that some of the flints are coarsely and others well marked, or that they are hewn, polished, and bored through, cannot by itself be looked upon as a proof that they were made at periods far apart from one another; and it has been asserted latterly that the difference in the manufacture of the flint implements is primarily caused by the difference in the material used. If flint or jasper is split, it produces flakes of more or less thin and knife-like form, and if these were shaped, other implements could be made out of them; crystalline stones, on the other hand, as gneiss, granite, deorite, etc., would have first to be polished. If this observation is correct, it quite destroys the theory that the age of hewn flint implements preceded that of polished flint implements." Further, a megalithic period is spoken of, that is, the period of large stone monuments, which have been called by the Celtic names of Dolmen, Menhir, Kromlech, etc. Such monuments, which are made of large stones placed on one another, or laid side by side, and under 1 Archiv für Anthr. i. 17, xii. 273. 2 Grewingk, see Archiv für. Anthr. viii. 82, 77. which graves are usually found, have been discovered in France, England, Ireland, and North Africa, etc.' In the graves we find sometimes only implements of stone, sometimes of bronze also. The monuments no doubt are of different periods, and partly belong to the Christian centuries, therefore it is not right to speak of a special megalithic period.2 Lubbock, however, does not rely only on the difference in the flint implements in distinguishing between the first and second stone ages. According to him, one of the characteristics of the paleolithic period is that the mammoth, the woolly haired rhinoceros, the hippopotamus, and other animals then lived in Europe, whereas these had died out in the neolithic period. This leads me to the discussion of another division of the prehistoric time, besides the division into the stone, bronze, and iron ages. This division is based upon the animals whose bones have been found intermingled with human remains and implements, and which it is supposed were contemporaneous with the men who have left these remains. Lartet, for instance, and other French savants enumerate the periods of the cave bear (Ursus spelaus), the mammoth (Elephas primigenius), the two-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros tichorrhinus), the reindeer (Cervus tarandus), and the aurochs (Bison europaus).3 Let us for the present put aside the attempts which have been made to identify these four periods with the different stone ages, and let us look at them a little 1 See illustrations in Baer's Der Vorgeschichtliche Mensch. p. 261 seq. 2 E. Desor, see Archiv für Anthr. i. 261. J. Ferguson, see Quarterly Review, vol. cxxxii. (1870) p. 439. Quatrefages, Rapport, p. 187. Nadaillac, L'ancienneté, p. 22. |