The Lignites of Dürnten present no Traces of Man.
The lignites of[1] Dürnten and Utznach, before mentioned, reveal to us the forests covering the Cantons of Zurich and St. Gall during the mid Pleistocene age, and which still continue to flourish in the same region. They consisted of spruce firs (Pinus abies), Scotch firs, and mountain pines (P. sylvestris and P. montana), larches, yews, birches, and sycamores, with an undergrowth of hazel. In them were to be met the straight-tusked elephant (E. antiquus), the big-nosed rhinoceros (R. Merkii, Jäger), the urus, and the stag, all of which lived in the mid Pleistocene period in the area of the lower Thames. These deposits of lignite, formed on the swampy sides of a lake, rest on a series of clays with stones that have been deposited by a retreating glacier, and they are also covered with a similar deposit of a glacier which occupied that area after the disappearance of the forest, and they are therefore interglacial.
To the animals found in the lignite beds, Professors Rütimeyer and Schwendauer have added man, on data which seem to me unsatisfactory. Several sticks about the size and shape of a cigar, with their outsides enveloped by fibres running at right angles to their long axes, are considered to be the remains of a kind of fossil basket-work. In the summer of 1877, on examining these specimens at Basel, thanks to the kindness of Professor Rütimeyer, I was struck by their resemblance to knots out of rotten pine trunks, in which a similar form is frequently to be observed. As the woody fibre of the
- ↑ Heer, Primeval World of Switzerland, ii., Appendix 1, c. 12. Rütimeyer, Archiv für Anthropologie, Aug. 1875, p. 133; Ueber die Herkunft unserer Thierwelt, 4to, 1867, p. 52 et seq.
