"The most interesting of the casts is that of two women, probably mother and daughter, lying feet to feet. They appear from their garb to have been people of poor condition. The elder seems to lie tranquilly on her side. Overcome by the noxious gases, she probably fell and died without a struggle. Her limbs are extended, and her left arm drops loosely; on one finger is still seen her coarse iron ring. Her child was a girl of fifteen; she seems, poor thing, to have struggled hard for life. Her legs are drawn up convulsively; her little hands are clenched in agony. In one she holds her veil, or a part of her dress, with which she had covered her head, burying her face in her arm, to shield herself from the falling ashes and from the foul sulphurous smoke. The form of her head is perfectly preserved. The texture of her coarse linen garments may be traced, and even the fashion of her dress, with its long sleeves reaching to her wrists; here and there it is torn, and the smooth young skin appears in the plaster like polished marble. On her tiny feet may still be seen her embroidered sandals."]

THE CONDITION OF PREHISTORIC MAN.

SIR JOHN LUBBOCK (b. 1834).

The results of archæological research for the fifty years 1831-1881 were thus briefly summarized by Sir John Lubbock in his presidential address to the British Association, York, August 1881.]

Few branches of science have made more rapid progress in the last half century than that which deals with the ancient condition of man. When our Association was founded, it was generally considered that the human race suddenly appeared on the scene, about six thousand years ago, after the disappearance of the extinct mammalia, and when Europe, both as regards physical conditions and the other animals by which it was inhabited, was pretty much in the same state as in the period covered by Greek and Roman history. Since then the persevering researches of Layard, Rawlinson, Botta and others, have made known to us, not only the statues and palaces of the ancient Assyrian monarchs, but even their libraries; the cuneiform characters have been deciphered, and we can not only see, but read in the British Museum, the actual contemporary records, on burned clay cylinders, of the events recorded in the

historical books of the Old Testament and in the pages of Herodotus. The researches in Egypt also seem to have satisfactorily established the fact that the pyramids themselves are at least six thousand years old, while it is obvious that the Assyrian and Egyptian monarchies cannot suddenly have attained to the wealth and power, the state of social organization, and progress in the arts, of which we have before us, preserved by the sand of the desert from the ravages of man, such wonderful proofs.

In Europe, the writings of the earliest historians and poets indicate that, before iron came into general use, there was a time when bronze was the ordinary material of weapons, axes, and other cutting implements; and though it seemed à priori improbable that a compound of copper and tin should have preceded the simple metal iron, nevertheless the researches of archæologists have shown that there really was in Europe a "Bronze Age," which at the dawn of history was just giving way to that of "Iron.”

The contents of ancient graves, buried in many cases so that their owners might carry some at least of their wealth with them to the world of spirits, have proved very instructive. More especially the results obtained by Nilsson in Scandinavia, by Hoare and Borlase, Bateman, Greenwell, and Pitt Rivers in our own country, and the contents of the rich cemetery at Hallstadt, left no room for doubt as to the existence of a Bronze Age; but we get a completer idea of the condition of man at this period from the Swiss lake-villages, first made known to us by Keller, and subsequently studied by Morlot, Troyon, Desor, Rütimeyer, Heer, and other Swiss archæologists. Along the shallow edges of the Swiss lakes there flourished, once upon a time, many populous villages or towns, built on platforms supported by piles, exactly as many Malayan villages are now. Under these circumstances innumerable objects were one by one dropped into the water; sometimes whole villages were burned, and their contents submerged; and thus we have been able to recover, from the waters of oblivion in which they had rested for more than two thousand years, not only the arms and tools of this ancient people, the bones of their animals, their pottery and ornaments, but the stuffs they wore, the grain they had stored up for future use, even fruits and cakes of bread.

But this bronze-using people were not the earliest occupants of Europe. The contents of ancient tombs give evidence of a

time when metal was unknown. This also was confirmed by the evidence then unexpectedly received from the Swiss lakes. By the side of the bronze-age villages were others, not less extensive, in which, while implements of stone and bone were discovered literally by thousands, not a trace of metal was met with. The shell-mounds or refuse-heaps accumulated by the ancient fishermen along the shores of Denmark, and carefully examined by Steenstrup, Worsaae, and other Danish naturalists, fully confirmed the existence of a "Stone Age."

We have still much to learn, I need hardly say, about this stone-age people, but it is surprising how much has been made out. Evans truly observes, in his admirable work on "Ancient Stone Implements,' ""that so far as external appliances are concerned, they are almost as fully represented as would be those of any existing savage nation by the researches of a painstaking traveller.' We have their axes, adzes, chisels, borers, scrapers, and various other tools, and we know how they made and how they used them; we have their personal ornaments and implements of war; we have their cooking utensils; we know what they ate and what they wore; lastly, we know their mode of sepulture and funeral customs. They hunted the deer and horse, the bison and urus, the bear and the wolf, but the reindeer had already retreated to the north.

No bones of the reindeer, no fragment of any of the extinct mammalia have been found in any of the Swiss lake-villages, or in any of the thousands of tumuli which have been opened in our own country, or in Central and Southern Europe. Yet the contents of caves and of river-graves afford abundant evidence that there was a time when the mammoth and rhinoceros, the musk-ox and reindeer, the cave-lion and hyena, the great bear and the gigantic Irish elk wandered in our woods and valleys, and the hippopotamus floated in our rivers; when England and France were united, and the Thames and the Rhine had a common estuary. This was long supposed to be before the advent of man. length, however, the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes in the valley of the Somme, supported as they are by the researches of many Continental naturalists, and in our own country those of MacEnery and Godwin Austen, Prestwich and Lyell, Vivian and Pengelly, Christy, Evans, and many more, have proved that man formed a humble part of this strange assembly.

At

Nay, even at this early period there were at least two distinct races of men in Europe; one of them, as Boyd-Dawkins has

pointed out, closely resembling the modern Esquimaux in form, in his weapons and implements, probably in his clothing, as well as in so many of the animals with which he was associated.

At this stage man appears to have been ignorant of pottery, to have had no knowledge of agriculture, no domestic animals except, perhaps, the dog. His weapons were the axe, the spear, and the javelin; I do not believe he knew the use of the bow, though he was probably acquainted with the lance. He was, of course, ignorant of metal; and his stone implements, though skilfully formed, were of quite different shapes from those of the second stone age, and were never ground. This earlier stone period, when man co-existed with these extinct mammalia, is known as the Palæolithic, or early stone age, in opposition to the Neolithic, or newer stone age.

The remains of the mammalia which co-existed with man in prehistoric times have been most carefully studied by Owen, Lartet, Rütimeyer, Falconer, Busk, Boyd-Dawkins, and others. The presence of the mammoth, the reindeer, and especially of the musk-ox, indicates a severe, not to say an Arctic, climate -the existence of which, moreover, was proved by other considerations; while, on the contrary, the hippopotamus requires considerable warmth. How then is this association to be explained?

While the climate of the globe is no doubt much affected by geographical conditions, the cold of the glacial period was, I believe, mainly due to the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit combined with the oblique effects of precession of the ecliptic. The result of the latter condition is a period of twenty-one thousand years, during one half of which the northern hemisphere is warmer than the southern, while during the other ten thousand five hundred years the reverse is the case. At present we are in the former phase, and there is, we know, a vast accumulation of ice at the South Pole. But when the Earth's orbit is nearly circular, as it is at present, the difference between the two hemispheres is not very great; while on the contrary, as the eccentricity of the orbit increases, the contrast between them increases also. This eccentricity is continually oscillating within certain limits which Croll and subsequently Stone have calculated for the last million years. At present the eccentricity is ⚫016 and the mean temperature of the coldest month in London is about 40°. Such has been the state of things for nearly one hundred thousand years; but before that there was a period, beginning three

hundred thousand years ago, when the eccentricity of the orbit varied from 26 to 57. The result of this would be greatly to increase the effect due to the obliquity of the orbit. At certain periods the climate would be much warmer than at present, while at others the number of days in winter would be twenty more and of summer twenty less, than now, while the mean temperature of the coldest month would be lowered 20°. We thus get something like a date for the last glacial epoch, and we see that it is not simply a period of cold, but rather one of extremes, each beat of the pendulum of temperature lasting for no less than twenty-one thousand years. This explains the fact that, as Morlot showed in 1854, the glacial deposits of Switzerland, and, as we now know, those of Scotland, are not a single uniform layer, but a succession of strata indicating very different conditions. I agree also with Croll and Geikie in thinking that these considerations explain the apparent anomaly of the coexistence in the same gravels of Arctic and Tropical animals; the former having lived in the cold, while the latter flourished in the hot periods.

It is, I think, now well established that man inhabited Europe during the milder periods of the glacial epoch. Some high authorities, indeed, consider that we have evidence of his presence in pre-glacial and even in miocene times, but I confess that I am not satisfied on this point. Even the more recent period carries back the record of man's existence to a distance so great as altogether to change our views of ancient history.

Nor is it only as regards the antiquity and material condition of man in prehistoric times that great progress has been made. If time permitted, I should have been glad to have dwelt on the origin and development of language, of custom, and of law. On all of these the comparison of the various lower races still inhabiting so large a portion of the Earth's surface has thrown much light; while even in the most cultivated nations we find survivals, curious fancies, and lingering ideas--the fossil remains, as it were, of former customs and religions, embedded in our modern civilization, like the relics of extinct animals in the crust of the Earth.

Address to the British Association, August 1881.