The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the
formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens
they have found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves,
is based the classification between the main periods or
divisions in the evolution of the human race above referred to.
It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were
reached; substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland
and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in Japan and in Brazil, in
Cuba and in the United States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly
every part of the world which was thoroughly examined.[294]
But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of
this same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 there were
discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities
indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in
the water at some distance from the shore; but the usual mixture
of thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have
prevailed, and nothing was done until about 1853, when new
discoveries of the same kind were followed up vigorously, and
Rutimeyer, Keller, Troyon, and others showed not only in the
Lake of Zurich, but in many other lakes in Switzerland, remains
of former habitations, and, in the midst of these, great numbers
of relics, exhibiting the grade of civilization which those
lakedwellers had attained.
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