Page:Natural History Review (1861).djvu/514

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502
ORIGINAL ARTICLES.

warrior was buried with his favorite weapons; gradually the inevitable tendency of ceremonies, or possibly a dim sense that axes and knives were more useful to the living than the dead, caused an alteration of the custom, and small models of the weapons were buried instead of the weapons themselves.

The same thing has been observed by M. Boucher de Perthes, in the valley of the Somme. He has discovered in the peat some burial places belonging probably to the Bronze age, and he supposes that it was customary for every one who attended the funeral, to cast some offering on the grave as a token of respect to the departed. Of these rude flints M. Boucher de Perthes possesses a great collection, and it is evident that they were never intended to be of any actual use. Mr. Franks, of the British Museum, informs me that much of the jewellery found in Etruscan tombs is so thin that it could not have been worn during life; and in Egyptian graves also models occur, instead of the weapons or implements themselves.

M. Worsäae is of opinion that there is sufficient evidence to indicate the separation of the Danish Stone age into two periods. However this may be, the remains found near Amiens and Abbeville, seem to me to justify our doing so, at least as regards France, but we did not see in Copenhagen any Danish flint weapons at all resembling the older forms from the gravels capping the hills on each side of the valley of the Somme, nor have any flint weapons of this type as yet been found in Ireland.

It is manifestly impossible to affix a date in years to the formation of the Kjökkenmöddings, which, nevertheless are, as evidently, of immense antiquity. We have seen that at the time of the Romans the country was, as now, covered by beech forests, and yet we know that during the Bronze age, beeches were absent, or only represented by a few stragglers, while the whole country was covered with oaks. This change implies a great lapse of time, even if we suppose that but a few generations of oaks succeeded one another. We know also that the oaks had been preceded by pines, and that the country was inhabited even then.

Again, the immense number of objects belonging to the Bronze age which have been found in Denmark from time to time, and the great number of burial places, appear to justify the Danish Archæologists in assigning to this period a very great lapse of time. The same arguments apply with even more strength to the remains of the Stone period, as a country the inhabitants of which live by hunting and fishing can never be thickly populated; and, on the whole, the conclusion is forced upon us, that the country must have been inhabited several thousand years before the Christian Era.

On the other hand no flint implements have yet been found in Denmark, which resemble those occurring in the drift near Amiens, Abbeville, and elsewhere. Not only, however, the great differences in the workmanship, but also the absence of any trace of the Elephant or Rhinoceros, with the human remains in Denmark, and their well attested presence in France, in the same strata with the flint imple-