primitive poles; and that they are not only
much longer than the ancient stakes, but
curiously worn to a gradual slenderness, and to
a point, by the gentle but constant action of the
waves upon their upper surfaces. Why is this
difference? Because these poles, when
discovered, still projected two or three feet above
the mud of the lake, while the others were
covered by the mud itself. Now it is calculated
that a thousand years, at least, must have
elapsed before the fir-poles could be brought, by
the slow action of tideless water, to the level of
the bed of the lake."

I own that these reasons did not quite
convince me of the deduction at which the professor
wished to arrive: namely, that the first, and not
altogether savage, inhabitants of Switzerland,
dated from two thousand years before Christ.
Many circumstances—draining, for instance—
might, I thought, have expedited the retiring of
the waters, or the wearing away of the piles.
Nevertheless, with all the caution of scepticism,
it is impossible not to allow that the Lake-relics
proceed from an age long anterior to the
Christian era, and very far more remote than the
Roman conquest. Even supposing the objects
now discovered, to be coeval with the time when
Herodotus mentions the Pæonian Lakers, they
remount to the seventy-fourth Olympiad,
answering to four hundred and eighty-four years
before Christ—an antiquity to be respected by
us poor mortals, who grow old in seventy whirls
of our little planet.

Pursuing our investigations, we find that,
dark as it may appear in its origin, the end of
this Lacustrine Dynasty has a sad light cast
upon its cause. The villages, the inhabitants,
all evidently perished by a sudden catastrophe;
and that catastrophe was Fire.

To understand this, reconstruct, by the architecture
of fancy, the primitive villages of the Swiss
Lakers. Take your stand on some rock of vantage,
whence you can see all that is not water, or
snowy summit, covered with black-looking
crowded pine-forests that teem with the red-deer
—once numerous in Switzerland, now extinct.
Throw out your narrow wooden causeways a
hundred yards forward into the shallow waters
nearest the shore, drive whole quincunxes of fir-
poles into the bed of the lake, top them with
rudely-fashioned planks, and upon the artificial
peninsula now elevated above the waters,
transport a bit of rivery Orientalism: dwelling-places
for man, gardens, if you wish, or patches of
ripened grain (for the catastrophe must have
happened at harvest time), such as, even at this
day, may be seen floating on the half-quaggy,
inundating rivers and channel-pools of China.
Penetrate into those circular Red Indian-like
wigwams that stand like beehives on the
stationary rafts, and see the rude pots upon the
earthen shelves, the traps in the floor for catching
or preserving fish, the little barbarian
children, tethered by the foot with a cord to a
projecting stake, lest they fall into the water
(both these particularities are mentioned by
Herodotus in his account of the Pseonians), and
behold the industrious natives themselves,
the pigmy race, with their small, but constructive
and not cruel heads, and their long, flexible
Hindoo-like hands. Enter their manufactories
for their ingenious tools and petty
ornaments; and, when you have set the whole
nation busy at their several employments,
suddenly crush the whole of your scene and drama
by the irruption of some wild band of warlike
Gauls, who annihilate our poor aborigines, and
their fragile dwellings, by casting fire-balls into
the Lake-villages, and killing or carrying away
the inhabitants.

No other combination of circumstances can
account for the appearances which the remains
of the Lake villages present. The carbonised
corn, the pieces of wood half burnt, the marks of
fire everywhere, all testify to the destruction of
these villages by fire. Then, again, it is
apparent that all industry stopped on a sudden.
The workman was at his polishing, the housewife
was grinding com by hand between two flat
stones, but, by a fate worse than that denounced
upon Jerusalem—"the one taken and the other
left"—of our poor Lake-people none were left.
The late explorers of these mysteries came, at
Moosseedorf, upon a marvellous heap of objects
of industry, which, by their state and number,
crowded over a considerable area, proved that
the discoverers were standing on the site of the
village manufactory of industrial implements.
Professor Troyon snowed me many proofs that
it was so—pieces of serpentine, half-fashioned
and thrown away because they had been broken
in the cutting, and rendered unfit for use; split
stag's-horn also rejected; and, more affecting
still, instruments that were not thrown away
because of defect, but were dropped unfinished
because of a sudden catastrophe: axes that lay
beside the handles, into which time was not
given to insert them; poniards yet unsharpened;
needles or hair-pins yet unpointed.

He who visits Pompeii is not so much
affected by the architecture he finds there,
as by the signs of human life that realise the
sudden destruction of the city. The woman's
crouching form, impressed upon the lava that
had filled a cellar, interests the heart more than
hundreds of tesselated pavements. The
remains fetched up from the subaqueous Pompeiis
of Switzerland also produce this touching and
human effect. They are more than books or
oldest parchments wherein to read how race
after race of men do verily pass away, according
to old Homer's deathless simile, like leaves
on trees. Science, too, on such evidences of
abrupt conclusions to things, is wonderfully
impelled to speculate on the wherefore of
these stern closings-up of human periods. It
is as if some power had grown tired of a
particular creation. Strong relation here to the
geology of nature, in which the mintage of
preceding eras is found suddenly to cease; the
medals, indeed, laid up in the stupendous
repositories of a past creation, but the die that
stamped them broken for ever, and cast away as
a thing of no account. No other wise is it with