as yet produced, it is certain that the Lapps or Finns differed in race from Denmark's original inhabitants." They were cut off from them throughout the whole. country down to the Cattegat and extreme coasts of Scania by wild and partly glacier-covered fields by rivers and lakes by immense and still impenetrable tracts of ancient forest. The oldest articles of stone and bone discovered in the extreme North may have an apparent likeness to Lappish or Finnish Stone-Age objects from Finland north Russia and the north of Asia. But both in material and form they differ entirely from the Early Stone-Age antiquities of southern Scandinavia. They constitute a distinct "Arctic" group in the European Stone-Age.

What people it was which showed the road for more highly developed races, and thus first laid the foundation for the settlement of Denmark in particular, and subsequently of the rest of the North, is just as unknown as the time of their arrival, extension, and final expulsion or absorption by a dominant race of higher standing. The solution of this problem it will be impossible to approach, until firmer starting-points from the western mother-countries have been gained by the Comparative Method. Speaking quite provisionally, after a survey of the duration of the subsequent stages of culture in the North itself, namely both in the Later Stone-Age and the whole Bronze-Age,-which must evidently embrace thousands of years before the Christian era,we may place the first inhabitants of Denmark at least three thousand years before the birth of Christ, or in all nearly five thousand years ago. A common fixed time so far as concerns the whole of ancient Denmark

B

is scarcely to be expected. The Early Stone-Age must certainly have appeared in Jutland before it reached the islands; where on the other hand it may have maintained its hold long after Jutland or at any rate the southern part of it had begun to be the seat of a new and higher development. Similar local differences. of time within the several stages of culture are more and more apparent everywhere, but of course still more distinctly in more extensive countries.

CHAPTER III.

THE LATER STONE-AGE IN THE NORTH.

IN the first settlement of Europe the fringe of coasts and nearest river courses had everywhere played a leading part. So long as hunting and fishing formed the most important resources of the settlers, and vast stretches of coast were still untrod by human foot, the primeval inhabitants, unaccompanied by any domestic animal save the dog, would have no great difficulty in spreading further or flitting from place to place, when they began to be pinched for food. In mountain lands there was seldom any lack of caves to shelter them from cold and storm. In wooded lowlands like Denmark humble cabins of earth and logs could be speedily rebuilt at any time.

Far slower and more difficult must have been the work of removal and settlement, when the people were accompanied by whole trains of domestic animalsoxen sheep swine and horses; when too they had to clear the virgin forests, to make way for larger fixed farms pasture and gardens. A very long time must have elapsed ere the more highly developed races steadily advancing from south and west were in a condition, as lake-dwellings stone graves and other memorials show,-to spread from the Mediterranean

coasts over Switzerland part of south Germany the whole of France Belgium Holland the British Isles and north-western Germany.

Meantime, while the new culture was again pushing forward east and south along the Rhine and Elbe into the heart of Germany, as far as Thuringia possibly, and northwards over the Scandinavian lands, the practical knowledge of metals-bronze and gold-must already have begun to spread in southern Europe.

The last period of the Stone-Age in the high North on the Baltic North Sea and Atlantic was therefore even in its earliest stage most probably contemporaneous with the victorious advance and first independent development of the Bronze-Age in more southern lands, particularly on the Mediterranean.

From many circumstances it is clear that the races which in the west of Europe during the period of the Stone-Age had the task of opening up the lands and so preparing the way for the introduction of a far higher culture, which brought with it the knowledge of metal, had themselves long ceased to be savage in the ordinary sense of the term or, as such, to remain unsusceptible of any foreign influence and incapable of self-improvement. In the South Sea Islands examples have recently been met with showing that Stone-Age peoples under exceptionally favourable circumstances have raised themselves to a not inconsiderable height of culture in comparison. with wretched savages in their vicinity.

In contrast with the actual uniformity which is distinctly apparent almost everywhere in south and west Europe in the remains of the older and ruder period of the Stone-Age, besides what is very common

and uniform, a richer diversity now begins to arise in different lands.

This would seem to indicate that the tribes of the Later Stone-Age during their gradual extension from the south over west and north-west Europe were steadily developing. In the Mediterranean countries numerous well-developed forms of pottery ornaments and implements of bone and polished stone have already been found. The implements are however still small. But this was due in part to the comparative rarity and smallness of the flint in those countries. Nor are the stone graves there distinguished for ambitious style of building. They are indeed comparatively rare owing to the early expulsion of the Stone Age in the South.

In France on the other hand the stone graves are beyond comparison more numerous and larger, especially to the west in the remote Britanny. Here the walls of the stone chambers are often decorated with carved ornaments and figures representing among other things axes of the same shape as the large handsomelypolished stone axes, which with other implements weapons and ornaments are found laid in the chambers along with the unburnt bodies of the dead. On the walls of some stone chambers in France and central Germany are figures designed even in colours. In Britanny in the immediate vicinity of the stone graves and closely associated with them may be seen immensely huge stones, often erected in long rows. On the whole the permanent memorials of the Stone-Age appear to have reached their highest pitch to the west, in Britanny and Ireland, where the people of western Europe during