Stone period, the facts already ascertained, like a few strokes by a clever draughtsman, supply us with the elements of an outline sketch. Carrying our imagination back into the past, we see before us on the low shores of the Danish Archipelago a race of small men, with heavy overhanging brows, round heads, and faces probably much like those of the present Laplanders. As they must evidently have had some protection from the weather, it is most probable that they lived in tents made of skins. The total absence of metal from the Kjökkenmöddings proves that they had not yet any weapons except those made of wood, stones, horns, and bones. Their principal food consisted of shell-fish, but they were able to catch fish, and often varied their diet by game caught in hunting. It is, perhaps, not uncharitable to conclude that, when then hunters were unusually successful, the whole community gorged itself with food, as is the case with many savage races at the present time. It is evident that marrow was considered a great delicacy, and every single bone which contained any was split open in the manner best adapted to extract the precious morsel.
The remains of the wild swan, which is only a winter visitor, and the state in which some of the deer-horns are found, prove that we have not here to do with mere summer quarters, and render it highly probable that the inhabitants resided on these spots all the year round, except, indeed, when obliged to move in search of shellfish, as is the case even now with the Fuegians, whose mode of life (Darwin's Journal, p. 234), gives us a vivid and probably correct idea of what was passing on the shores of the Danish fjords several thousand years ago.
If the absence of cereal remains justifies us, as it appears to do, in concluding that they had no knowledge of agriculture, they must certainly have sometimes suffered from periods of great scarcity, though, on the other hand, they were blessed in the ignorance of spirituous liquors, and saved thereby from what is at present the greatest scourge of Northern Europe.
While one race of men has thus exterminated another, and has in its turn been supplanted by a third, great changes in the vegetation have also taken place. At present the beech woods are the pride of the country, and are considered by the Danes to be the finest in the world. Many of the trees are of great size, and the forests are popularly supposed to have existed from time immemorial. This, however, is a mistake, as is proved by the trees found in the peatbogs. Some of these bogs, which are known in Denmark under the name of Skovmose, are small and deep depressions which have been gradually filled up by the growth of peat, and by the trunks of trees which grew on the edge and fell into the hollow. The lowest portion of the deposit consists, however, entirely of peat, and it is only in the upper part that the tree stems are found. It was at first supposed that these were blown down by the wind, but it has been observed that their heads always lie towards the centre of the moss. When this latter is of small diameter, it sometimes happens that the stems from one side cross those from the other, and the whole depression
