of concurrent philological evidence, based upon the resemblances between the Aryan languages of Europe, so strangely akin to each other, and the ancient dialects of India and Persia.  But plausible as this argument looks, the more probable explanation is that the inhabitants of Europe obtained the material which they laboriously fashioned into tools from the East, according to a system of barter similar to that which still exists amongst tribes more rude and savage than the Swiss lake-dwellers.  Numerous facts of a like tendency are on record, such as the finding in the mounds of the Mississippi valley, side by side, obsidian from Mexico and mica from the Alleghanies, and in the mounds around the great northern lakes large tropical shells two thousand miles from their native habitat.  The ancient inhabitants of China and India found at a very early period that they possessed in their jade rocks a very valuable material, in exchange for which they could get what they wanted from the Western races; while these Western races had at least one article which they could barter for the much-prized jade implements, viz. linen cloth, the weaving of which was practised in the oldest settlements, hanks of unspun flax and thread, nets and cloth of the same material having been found not unfrequently in the lake dwellings.

What an interesting glimpse into the far-off past does this link of connection between the East and the West give us!  It indicates a degree of civilisation which we are not accustomed to associate with these primeval times.  Archaeologists are of opinion that the race who inhabited Central Europe during the earlier part of the stone age were akin to the modern Laplanders.  The people of the lake dwellings, however, and especially those who used jade implements, who replaced them, were a superior and more civilised race.  The evidence of the articles which they used, with the exception of jade itself, points not to an Asiatic origin, but rather to a connection with the shores on both sides of the Mediterranean.  When they migrated northwards they brought with them the flax and the cereals of Egypt, and introduced with them the southern weeds which grew among these cultivated plants.  The seeds of the catch-fly of Crete, which does not grow in Switzerland or Germany, have been found among the relics of the earliest of the lake dwellings; while the familiar corn blue-bottle of our autumn fields was first brought from its native Sicily by this lacustrine people in whose cultivated fields it grew as a weed, and by them spread over all Western and Northern Europe.  Such are the interesting associations and profound problems connected with the material of the martyr weights.  And it is unique in this respect, that it meets us as far back as the first traces of neolithic man in Central Europe—­nay, farther back still, in the palaeolithic flints found in the caves near Mentone; and that it is still used in the countries where it is found for