To the earth, man instinctively turns for the
archives of the past—to the earth—the great
Keeper of the dead—the Preserver of extinct
forms and vanished dynasties. We rifle tombs;
we drive pits into buried cities; we plunge into
railway cuttings; and so lay bare, and extract,
the life of other days, as it is made manifest in
its domestic implements, its handiworks, and
ornaments, its modes of sepulture, and scrolls of
epitaph. For many a year we have been
burrowing thus: so that, since the day when, in
seventeen hundred and eleven, Herculaneum
gave up to view her first secrets, subterranean
research has become an art that is already
advancing to a respectable maturity. But the
immense stride forward that it has made in our
day, is owing to the multitude of objects and
observations that have been so discovered and
accumulated as to admit of chronology being
founded, not on conjectural eras, but on the
objects themselves, which, wheresoever found,
illustrate and determine these eras. The old
natural geology loosely judged of periods by
the mere substances in which certain fossils
were found. It babbled of the green sand
fossils, the fossils of the coal, the fossils of the
chalk, &c. But this method of classification
was found to be misleading and imperfect.
"It is well known" (as Sir R. I. Murchison
in his Siluria observes) "that a mass of
sediment which in one tract is calcareous, often
becomes sandy and argillaceous in another; and
thus, in such cases, very close examination of
the fossils can alone decide the exact line of
demarcation." To this I add, from my own
observation, that, in Switzerland, where there
is no chalk, the peculiar fossils belonging
to the cretaceous period are found in clay.
Safely and rightly, then, each period of ascending
organisation is decided by the fossil which
is unalterable, and not by the local matter around
it, which is susceptible of very great and
surprising transformation. So it is with Human
Geology. Recent works on ancient pottery
take the line of judging of the age of a vase by
form and manner of embellishment, not by the
locality in which the vase is found. The
Etrurian tomb, in which certain urns are discovered,
does not prove that the urns are Etrurian;
the forms of them, and the pigments, and the
figures on them, may determine that they are of
Greek, or haply of Egyptian origin, and that
they hare come from afar.

The same analytical argument that has
been found satisfactory in respect to earth-
buried objects, is now being applied to
certain relics of antiquity discovered in water.
The discovery has taken place in some of
the lakes of Switzerland; and, it is found
that these relics are indubitably of a period
far anterior to the Roman conquest. Traces
of lake dwellings, even of lake villages,
have been discovered; that is, of cabins that
have rested on piles, advancing, Dutch fashion,
far into the water. 'The most remarkable of
these discoveries was made in eighteen
hundred and fifty-six, in the Lake of Moosscedorf,
six miles from Berne. This lake, having
been partially drained for agricultural purposes,
gave to view the broken remains of stakes
projecting a little above the mud that formed the
bed of the lake. A further search revealed
that many more stakes were hidden; being
covered by a kind of under-water peat, in which
have been found upwards of a thousand articles
of a simple, and evidently very remote
manufacture.

Taking for granted that a nation in its infancy
uses, for its immediate purposes, only the
substances which it finds ready to its hand, we
cannot but assign to articles composed merely
of stone, wood, or clay, a high antiquity.
Reversing old fables, we discover that the golden
age was not the age of gold, but of wood and
stone. Of course these primitive substances,
worked by human hands, have the priority
over articles wrought from metal. Ops gave
Saturn a stone to devour, long before Vulcan
(scripturally Tubal Cain) became "the instructor
of every artificer in brass and iron." Judging
thus, we find that the articles from the Lake of
Moosseedorf bear the stamp of primitive
antiquity. They consist of fragments of rude
pottery, made by the hand, evidently without
a turning-wheel, domestic implements in
stone and stag's-horn, without any trace of
metal. The stone—a kind of serpentine,
extremely hard—is fashioned into hatchets
bearing the form of a wedge, and into instruments
resembling chisels, hammers, and knives.
Not one of the hatchets has been pierced as
in our clay so as to admit of a handle being
inserted into it; on the contrary, the stone
hatchet-head itself has been inserted into a
handle, generally of stag's-horn, in some few
cases, of wood.

Passing some time at Lausanne, I was made
aware of these discoveries in, and near to, the
Lake of Moosseedorf; and obtained a note of
introduction to Professor Troyon, head of the
Museum at Lausanne, who had transferred
from the natural Museum of the Peat-moss, a
quantity of the sub-lacustrine articles to a well-
ordered museum of his own.

The professor, a most intelligent gentleman,
with a benevolent countenance, began his
lecture (for such, unaffected as it was, his
discourse might be called) by opening a cupboard
and displaying a variety of human skulls. These
were all the skulls of Helvetians, or of Celts prior
to Helvetians, or of some unnamed people older
than the Celts. These, like many other articles in
this private museum, had been chiefly discovered
or dug up from ancient tumuli by the professor
himself. He made me observe how small were
the earliest skulls—unintellectual, but not cruel
like some of later savage nations in which the
great proportion of brain lay behind the car;
and so led me on to the higher developments of
the skulls of the civilised, that occupied the
upper shelves of the closet. We next proceeded
to survey the contents of the first glass case,
which were supposed to be coeval with the
small-skulled generation. These were the horn