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By collecting and studying a vast variety of such implements, and other articles of human workmanship preserved in peat and in sand-dunes on the coast, as also in certain shell-mounds of the aborigines presently to be described, the Danish and Swedish antiquaries and naturalists, MM. Nilsson, Steenstrup, Forchhammer, Thomsen, Worsaae, and others, have succeeded in establishing a chronological succession of periods, which they have called the ages of stone, of bronze, and of iron, named from the materials which have each in their turn served for the fabrication of implements.
The list of mammalia already comprises a large proportion of those proper to the Swiss lake-dwellings, and to the shell-mounds and peat of Denmark; but unfortunately as yet no special study has been made of the French fauna, like that by which the Danish and Swiss zoologists and botanists have enabled us to compare the wild and tame animals and the vegetation of the age of stone with that of the age of iron.
Man is the only animal who has the propensity of depicting external forms, and of availing himself of the use of fire. Shell-mounds, consisting of bones and shells, some of which may be justly described as of vast extent, and of a date anterior to the Bronze age, and full of stone implements, bear in all their parts indications of the use of fire.
The shell-mounds of which we have so far been speaking are all near the sea, but there is yet another consisting entirely of marine shells fifty miles beyond Mobile.
We learn, from the Danish peat and shell-mounds, and from the older Swiss lake-settlements, that the first inhabitants were hunters who fed almost entirely on game, but their food in after ages consisted more and more of tamed animals and still later a more complete change to a pastoral state took place, accompanied as population increased by the cultivation of some cereals.
I cannot close this account of the kitchen-middings, without calling attention to two very interesting facts. The importance of these mounds bears witness alike to the number of the inhabitants who dwelt near them, and the long duration of their sojourn. Worsaae sets back the initial date of the most ancient of the shell-mounds of the New World more than three thousand years.
John Lubbock published, after these sheets were written, an able paper on the Danish "Shell-mounds" in the October number of the "Natural History Review" 1861 page 489, in which he has described the results of a recent visit to Denmark, made by him in company with Mr. In addition to the peat-mosses, another class of memorials found in Denmark has thrown light on the pre-historical age.
The kitchen-middings, or heaps of kitchen refuse such was the name given to these shell-mounds could not have been the natural deposits left by the waves after storms, for in that case they would have been mixed with quantities of sand and pebbles. The conclusion is inevitable, that man alone could have piled up these accumulations, which were the refuse flung away day by day after his meals.
The kitchen-middens, or shell-mounds, of Denmark belong exclusively to the Neolithic period. Where the transition was made from the Stone Age to the Age of Bronze, it apparently occurred in some cases by degrees, and peacefully; but sometimes by the incoming of an invading people more advanced.
Recent and Post-pliocene Periods. Terms defined. Formations of the Recent Period. Modern littoral Deposits containing Works of Art near Naples. Danish Peat and Shell-mounds. Swiss Lake-dwellings. Periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Post-pliocene Formations. Coexistence of Man with extinct Mammalia. Reindeer Period of South of France. Alluvial Deposits of Paleolithic Age.
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