results, man is almost exclusively frugiverous, drawing nearly all he requires for food, as well as for shelter and clothing, from the plants which spring up- in profusion around him. On the other hand, in the inhospitable circumpolar regions, (although the Esquimaux eats with relish the half-digested moss which he finds in the stomach of the reindeer,) he is compelled to counteract the rigour of the climate by a large consumption of flesh food, and especially of such as is rich in carbon.

We find, however, that independently of mere climatal considerations, in localities in which the conditions are such as to admit of vigorous plant growth, the extent to which man carries the utilisation of plant life for food and otherwise varies much, but that it certainly increases in direct ratio with his ascent in the scale of civilization; and it is my chief object in this paper to show the progress which has taken place in plant cultivation, during the gradual rise of man in civilization in those parts of Western Europe in which that subject has been investigated: because, in the first place, it is from thence that we have obtained the greater part of the plants, whether used for food or otherwise, which are cultivated amongst us; and because, in the next place, the climatal conditions which now obtain there bear a close resemblance to those of our Islands.

The earliest rude inhabitants of Western Europe of whom any traces have been discovered, are known as Paleolithic men. Their remains are usually found in caves and rock-shelters, associated with those of many animals now extinct, amongst which were the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the reindeer, the stag, the lion, the hyæna, and the bear. Remote, however, as the period is from the present time, during which the earlier races of these ancient men existed, the remains left behind them and by their successors of that age, in the caves and rock-shelters which they inhabited, give, to use the words of Mr. Boyd Dawkins, “as vivid a picture of the human life of the period, as that revealed of Italian life in the first century by the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.” These old floors of human occupation contain broken bones of animals killed in the chase, mingled with rude implements, weapons of bone and unpolished stone, and charcoal and burnt stones, which indicate the position of their hearths. And not alone do these remains point to the co-existence of man with the extinct mammalia to which I have referred, but they also afford clear evidence of the climatal conditions which obtained during the different portions of the Paleolithic period, and a clue to the characteristics of the race to which the men belonged. Mr. Boyd Dawkins, in speaking of later Paleolithic times, tells us that, in the caves which yield evidences of man's occupation, “flakes without number, rude stone-cutters, awls, lance-heads, hammers, saws made of

flint or of chert, rest pěle-měle with bone needles, sculptured reindeer antlers, engraved stones, arrow-heads, harpoons and pointed bones, and with the broken remains of the animals which had been used as food—the reindeer, bison, horse, the ibex the saiga antelope, and the musk sheep. In some cases the whole is compacted, by a calcareous cement, into a hard mass, fragments of which are to be seen in the principal museums of Europe. This strange accumulation of débris marks, beyond all doubt, the place where ancient hunters had feasted, and the broken bones and implements are merely the refuse cast aside. The reindeer formed by far the larger portion of the food, and must have lived in enormous herds in the centre of France. The severity of the climate at that time may be inferred by the presence of this animal, as well as by the accumulation of bones in the spots on which man had fixed his habitation. Indeed, had this not been the case, the decomposition of so much animal matter would have rendered the place uninhabitable even by the lowest savage.”

These facts do indeed afford a vivid picture of the life conditions under which man existed at a time unquestionably separated from the present age by countless centuries, and that too, in parts of Europe which now sustain a rich and varied vegetation, and in which, except the horse, all the animals above referred to are now extinct and are replaced by herds of domesticated oxen and deer, by flocks of sheep and goats, and by numerous other animals maintained either for their profit or for their beauty.

It must be manifest that during this earlier period the human inhabitants could have derived as little of their nutriment from vegetable substances, as do the Esquimaux and Samoyeds of the present day, and that it is more than probable they devoured, with the same greedy relish as the former, the partly digested matter found in the stomachs of the ruminants upon the flesh of which they chiefly subsisted. Had they possessed any of the vegetable foods which, as we shall find in the sequel, were abundantly consumed by the Neolithic men by whom they were succeeded, some remnants of such food would unquestionably have been discovered amongst the débris of their feasts, by the scientific observers who so fully and closely examined those débris; and the complete absence of any such remnants, not only justifies us in assuming that they did not possess foods of the kinds referred to, but also serves to strengthen the view expressed above as to the nature of the contemporaneous climatal conditions.

A great advance in the vegetable food available for man in Western Europe is found to have taken place in Neolithic times. We have no means of estimating the length of the interval which separated even the later Paleolithic from that part of the Neolithic period to which I am about to refer, but the geological evidence alone indicates that it must have been enormous, that

evidence being supported by the fact that an extraordinary improvement had taken place in the climatal, and, indeed, in the physical conditions generally of the district in question, as indicated by the almost universal presence within it of an abundant and varied vegetation, and of a fauna analogous to that which now exists.

Our chief positive knowledge of the vegetable food resources of the Neolithic people of Western Europe has resulted from the discovery, made about thirty years ago, of the remains of the Swiss lake-dwellings, which led to those interesting investigations which have been recorded in the great work of Dr. Ferdinand Keller, President of the Antiquarian Society of Zurich.

This discovery was first brought under the notice of the Society at Zurich by Dr. Aeppli, of Ober Meilen, who reported that remains of human industry, likely to throw unexpected light on the primæval history of the earlier inhabitants of the country, had been brought to light, owing to the occurrence in the early part of that year of an unexampled drought, accompanied with such severe cold that the rivers were practically dried up. The result of this drought was to lower the water of the lake to such an extent, at a place where some reclamation works were going on, as to enable the workmen to excavate the land upon the shore immediately in front of their retaining wall, to a considerable depth below the ordinary water level. In making these excavations they found the heads of old piles in sitû, and great numbers of stags' bones, mixed with implements and other relics of human occupation. This led to further investigations on the spot, and to similar investigations in other places, which were followed by the discovery of a large number of the settlements now known as lake-dwellings, and to the general results so elaborately detailed in Dr. Keller's great work. Great interest was at once excited amongst scientific inquirers throughout Europe, more especially as the very first settlement which was examined, namely, that of Meilen, was found to belong almost exclusively to the Neolithic age, for, with the exception of two metal objects, all the antiquities obtained there consisted of bone, iron, wood, stone or earthenware. In order that you may understand the conditions under which these antiquities have been so long preserved, I will endeavour to give you, as shortly as I can, an idea of the general structure of the lake-dwellings.

The settlement of which any assemblage of dwellings was composed was usually formed in a shallow part of the lake on the borders of which it was established. At a short distance from the shore a rectangular space was enclosed by a row of strong piles, which were often covered on the outside with wattling or hurdle work, intended either to lessen the splash of the water or to prevent injury to the piles by the impact of floating wood or of the canoes of the people. Within the inclosure thus formed,

rows of piles, generally in regular order, were driven at short distances from each other, the heads being brought to a general level with the outer boundary. Upon these piles a rough platform was constructed, often consisting of one or two layers of unbarked beams lying parallel to one another. Upon this platform rude houses were erected, the extent of the platform and the number of houses being of course regulated by the number of persons of which the settlement was composed. That portion of the platform which was within the area of each house was covered with clay mixed with gravel, firmly beaten down to form an even floor, and each house had a proper cooking-hearth. The houses appear to have been rectangular in form, their sides consisting of wattle and daub, and the roof thatched with straw or rushes. These platforms were always at some distance from the shore, with which they were connected by narrow bridges, formed also on piles. Whether the footways of these bridges were movable does not appear; but it is probable that this was the case, in order to prevent surprise on the part of an enemy desirous of attacking the settlement from the landward. It appears that all the refuse from these dwellings was thrown into the water below, through openings left in the platform for that purpose. The general conditions under which the earlier of these people appear to have lived is the more especially interesting to us, because, singularly enough, it is to the condition of the aboriginal New Zealanders, as described by Cook, that Dr. Keller compares the degree of civilization to which the inhabitants of the settlement of Meilen had apparently attained, as indicated by the remains discovered.

After extracting from “Hawkesworth's Voyages,” Vol. III., page 395, a full account of the habits of life of the New Zealanders as there given, he proceeds to show the close resemblance to that account which is indicated by the remains found at Meilen and many other of the more ancient lake settlements. He then tells us, in regard to their domestic economy, (with reference particularly to the supply of vegetable food,) that in every lake-dwelling were to be found stones for bruising and grinding grain, or what are called corn-crushers and mealing-stones; that the very grain itself has been found at Meilen, Moosseedorf, and Wangen, nay, even the very loaves or cakes in their original form; and that we must therefore recognize the colonists as agriculturists, and see them advanced to that grade of civilization in which men have permanent abodes, and have secured for themselves some degree of social order. He remarks that the tilling of the ground must have been simple in the highest degree, and have consisted merely in tearing it up by means of inefficient tools made of stags' horns or crooked branches of trees, as is still done by some of the North American Indians, and was formerly done (as regards crooked pieces of wood and

other rude implements) by the Maoris; but he points out, nevertheless, that the products obtained from this rude cultivation were generally excellent—a fact known to ourselves as regards the Maoris—because, as a rule, they always used rich virgin soil, or soil that had long lain fallow, for growing their crops in.

Dr. Keller refers us to a treatise by Professor Heer on the plants used by the Lake-dwellers, for information as to their husbandry, and it is from that treatise, and from the investigations of Alphonse de Candolle and others, that I have prepared the following résumé of the subject. The remains of plants, from which Professor Heer drew his conclusions, were found lying in the lake mud below the sites of the various settlements, or buried under peat, several feet thick, formed since the settlements ceased to exist. They were found mixed with stones, fragments of pottery, domestic instruments, charcoal, ashes, and other unmistakable evidences of human occupation, and consisted of remains of cereals, of weeds usually associated with cornfields, of culinary vegetables, of fruits and berries, of nuts, of oil-producing and aromatic plants, of bast and fibrous plants, of plants used for dyeing, of mosses and ferns, of fungi for kindling fire, and of water and marsh plants. Of the plants used for food the cereals were evidently the most important, and consisted of a now extinct form of wheat called the “lake-dwelling wheat,” and of a small-grained six-rowed barley, also extinct; whilst the spelt (which at present is one of the most important cereals,) and the oat did not appear until the Bronze age, and rye was entirely unknown. With the exception of a pea no culinary vegetable can certainly be mentioned as belonging to this period, but a small bean and a field lentil appear during the Bronze period. As to fruits, they appear to have been possessed of an abundance of crab apples, and in the later periods of a larger but still inferior species of apple, which may have been the result of cultivation; of a small and inferior description of pear, found associated with the relics of the Bronze period; of a plum closely allied to the bullace; of sloes, bird cherries, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries, whilst it seems that they also used the fruits of the dog-rose and elder. Beech nuts were found in large quantities, and cakes, of the seed of the garden or field-poppy and carraway seeds, occurred amongst the remains of some of the more recent settlements.

Heer and de Candolle both remark that the Lake-dwellers could not have had any close connection with the people of Eastern Europe, otherwise they would, without doubt, have cultivated rye, and that the plants actually cultivated show that their chief intercourse must have been with the people of the Mediterranean basin. Every species of corn which they used had certainly come from that quarter, for it was identical with

those cultivated in Southern Italy, whilst the millets were similar to those cultivated in Egypt.

In connection with the character of the vegetation under notice, Professor Heer points out that it affords some clue to the determination of the age of the lake-dwellings, and by means of this and other evidence bearing on the question, he came to the conclusion that, whilst the most recent of those dwellings, namely those of the Bronze period, might be not less than 2,000 years old, the oldest might date back for thousands of years before the commencement of the Christian era. He also points out that those remains, which unquestionably have a very high antiquity, throw some light on the solution of the question whether the species of plants have undergone any change in historic time. As regards the wild plants he answers the question in the negative, (a conclusion concurred in by the late Mr. Darwin, for reasons given in detail in his work hereafter referred to,) but finds that the case is different with the cultivated plants, for that the greater number of those agree with no recent forms sufficiently to allow of their being classed together. He tells us that the small Celtic bean, the pea, the small lake-dwelling barley, the Egyptian and the small lake-dwelling wheat, and the two-rowed wheat or emmer, form peculiar and apparently extinct races, and he adds that man must, therefore, in course of time, have produced sorts which gave a more abundant yield, and have gradually supplanted the old varieties. Mr. Darwin sums up the investigations of Heer and others in passages which are to be found at pages 318 and 319 of the first volume of his great work on “Animals and Plants under Domestication,” a work which, by the way, ought to be closely studied by every breeder of animals and cultivator of the soil.

From all this it will be seen that the great advance in civilization exhibited by even the earlier Neolithic over the latest Paleolithic inhabitants of Western Europe, may be assigned chiefly to their possession of an abundant supply of vegetable food, suitable, not only for man, but also for the maintenance of domesticated animals, of which, as Professor Rütemeyer of Basle tells us, they possessed several species.

I do not propose to deal with the long period which has intervened between the occupation of the lake-dwellings and the present time, which pertains entirely to the historic period, not only because it would stretch this paper to an inconvenient length, but because we shall be able more clearly and highly to appreciate the advance made in the character of our vegetable food during this interval, by a comparison of the inferior species possessed by even the later inhabitants of the lake-dwellings, with the rich produce now found in the cultivated fields and gardens of Western Europe. This is vividly brought to our