inscription or manuscript or even monument; it is not, like the Asiatic,
a conscious work of a people leaving a memorial of itself to a future
age. It is rather, like the geological history, an unconscious, gradual
deposit left by the remains of extinct and unknown races in the soil of
the fields or under the sediment of the waters. The earliest European
barbarian, as he burned his canoe from a log, or fabricated his necklace
from a bone, or worked out his knife from a flint, was in reality
writing a history of his race for distant days. We can follow him now
in his wanderings through the rivers and lakes and on the edges of the
forests; we open his simple mounds of burial, and study his barbarian
tools and ornaments; we discover that he knew nothing of metals, and
that bone and flint and amber and coal were his materials; we trace out
his remarkable defences and huts built on piles in the various lakes of
Europe, where the simple savage could escape the few gigantic "fossil"
animals which even then survived, and roved through the forests of
Prussia and France, or the still more terrible human enemies who were
continually pouring into Germany, Denmark, and Switzerland from the
Asiatic plains. We find that the early savage of Switzerland and Sweden
was not entirely ignorant of the care of animals, and that he had
fabricated some rude pottery. Of what race he was, or when he appeared
amid the forests of Northern Europe, no one can confidently say.
Collecting the various indications from the superstitions, language,
and habits of this barbarian people, and comparing them with like
peculiarities of the most ancient races now existing in Europe, we can
frame a very plausible hypothesis that these early savages belonged to
that great family of which the Finns and Laps, and possibly the Basques,
are scattered members. Their skulls, also, are analogous in form to
those of the Finnish race. This age the archaeologists have denominated
the "Stone Age" of European antiquity.