HKB
people coming from the East, to whom the use of swords, spears, and other weapons of bronze was familiar. Hatchets, however, of copper have been found in the Danish peat.
The next stage of improvement, or that manifested by the substitution of iron for bronze, indicates another stride in the progress of the arts. Iron never presents itself, except in meteorites, in a native state, so that to recognise its ores, and then to separate the metal from its matrix, demands no inconsiderable exercise of the powers of observation and invention. To fuse the ore requires an intense heat, not to be obtained without artificial appliances, such as pipes inflated by the human breath, or bellows, or some other suitable machinery.
DANISH SHELL-MOUNDS, OR KJOKKENMODDING.*
(* Mr. John Lubbock published, after these sheets were written, an able paper on the Danish "Shell-mounds" in the October number of the "Natural History Review" 1861 page 489, in which he has described the results of a recent visit to Denmark, made by him in company with Mr. Busk.)
In addition to the peat-mosses, another class of memorials found in Denmark has thrown light on the pre-historical age. At certain points along the shores of nearly all the Danish islands, mounds may be seen, consisting chiefly of thousands of cast-away shells of the oyster, cockle, and other molluscs of the same species as those which are now eaten by Man. These shells are plentifully mixed up with the bones of various quadrupeds, birds, and fish, which served as the food of the rude hunters and fishers by whom the mounds were accumulated. I have seen similar large heaps of oysters, and other marine shells with interspersed stone implements, near the seashore, both in Massachusetts and in Georgia, U.S.A., left by the native North American Indians at points near to which they were in the habit of pitching their wigwams for centuries before the white man arrived.
Such accumulations are called by the Danes, Kjokkenmodding, or "kitchen-middens." Scattered all through them are flint knives, hatchets, and other instruments of stone, horn, wood, and bone, with fragments of coarse pottery, mixed with charcoal and cinders, but never any implements of bronze, still less of iron. The stone hatchets and knives had been sharpened by rubbing, and in this respect are one degree less rude than those of an older date, associated in France with the bones of extinct mammalia, of which more in the sequel. The mounds vary in height from 3 to 10 feet, and in area are some of them 1000 feet long, and from 150 to 200 wide. They are rarely placed more than 10 feet above the level of the sea, and are confined to its immediate neighbourhood, or if not (and there are cases where they are several miles from the shore), the distance is ascribable to the entrance of a small stream, which has deposited sediment, or to the growth of a peaty swamp, by which the land has been made to advance on the Baltic, as it is still doing in many places, aided, according to Puggaard, by a very slow upheaval of the whole country at the rate of 2 or 3 inches in a century.
There is also another geographical fact equally in favour of the antiquity of the mounds, namely, that they are wanting on those parts of the coast which border the Western Ocean, or exactly where the waves are now slowly eating away the land. There is every reason to presume that originally there were stations along the coast of the North Sea as well as that of the Baltic, but by the gradual undermining of the cliffs they have all been swept away.