The illustrations of discoidal stones on page 263 are from the “North Americans of Antiquity,” p. 77.  The objects represented were taken from an ancient mound in Illinois.  It would be indeed surprising if two distinct peoples, living in two different continents, thousands of miles apart, should, without any intercourse with each other, not only form their vases in the same inconvenient form, but should hit upon the same expedient as a remedy.

We observe, in the American spear-head and the Swiss hatchets, on the opposite page, the same overlapping of the metal around the staff, or handle—­a very peculiar mode of uniting them together, which has now passed out of use.

A favorite design of the men of the Bronze Age in Europe is the spiral or double-spiral form.  It appears on the face of the urn in the shape of a lake dwelling, which is given on p. 255; it also appears in the rock sculptures of Argyleshire, Scotland, here shown.

We find the same figure in an ancient fragment of pottery from the Little Colorado, as given in the “United States Pacific Railroad Survey Report,” vol. iii., p. 49, art.  Pottery.  It was part of a large vessel.  The annexed illustration represents this.

Discoidalstones, Illinois.

Copper spear-head, lake superior.

Bronze hatchets, Switzerland.

The same design is also found in ancient rock etchings of the Zunis of New Mexico, of which the cut on p. 265 is an illustration.

We also find this figure repeated upon vase from a Mississippi Valley mound, which we give elsewhere. (See p. 260.)

It is found upon many of the monuments of Central America.  In the Treasure House of Atreus, at Mycenae, Greece, a fragment of a pillar was found which is literally covered with this double spiral design. (See “Rosengarten’s Architectural Styles,” p, 59.)

This Treasure House of Atreus is one of the oldest buildings in Greece.

We find the double-spiral figure upon a shell ornament found on the breast of a skeleton, in a carefully constructed stone coffin, in a mound near Nashville, Tennessee.

Lenormant remarks ("Anc.  Civil.,” vol. ii., p. 158) that the bronze implements found in Egypt, near Memphis, had been buried for six thousand years; and that at that time, as the Egyptians had a horror of the sea, some commercial nation must have brought the tin, of which the bronze was in part composed, from India, the Caucasus, or Spain, the nearest points to Egypt in which tin is found.

Heer has shown that the civilized plants of the lake dwellings are not of Asiatic, but of African, and, to a great extent, of Egyptian origin.  Their stone axes are made largely of jade or nephrite, “a mineral which, strange to say, geologists have not found in place on the continent of Europe.” (Foster’s “Prehistoric Races,” p. 44.)