The universal geography : earth and its inhabitants

INHABITANTS—PREHISTORIC REMAINS. 59a^e, for no discoveries have been made except of stone arms and implements,besides coarse earthenware. Both the coast-line and the saline character of thewaters must have also undergone great changes since then, for the oyster, at thattime so common, can no longer live in these seas, owing to the small quantity ofsalt they now contain. Some of the bones found in the middens—as, for instance,those of the Tctrao ur illus—also bear witness to the severity of the Danishclimate at this period.To the remains found in the peat beds and middens must be added the weapons,utensils, and ornaments collected in great quantities from the megalithic graves ofdivers forms, with one, two, or more chambers, scattered over the land. Amongthese monuments the oldest are the round barrows and long mounds. The giants'chambers (Jcettcstuer or steenchjsser) are built with more art, and are composed ofseveral compartments of granite blocks, covered over by a hillock of earth. Manyseem to have been family sepulchres, and in them have been found the bones ofwild and domestic animals buried with the dead, together with implements, arms,and ornaments. These burial-places belong mostly to the last period of thepolished stone and bronze age, and to a settled people already skilled in stockbreedingand the elementary principles of agriculture.Iron seems to have finally prevailed in these regions about the time of SeptimiusSeverus, or towards the close of the second century, and from this epoch also datethe earliest Runic inscriptions. Very remarkable objects of local origin, orimported from abroad, have been discovered in some of the graves. Such is thecup found at Stevns Flint, inSjalland, with a chased silver rim bearing a Greeklegend. At Bornholm the age of iron was developed under special conditions.Here are thousands of graves called brandplctter, consisting of excavations filledwith charcoal, human ashes, and bones, with fragments of arms and implementsin iron and bronze, contorted by the action of fire. The burial-place of Kannikegaard,near Nexo, alone contains over twelve hundred of such graves, and two othercemeteries have nine hundred each ; but the more recent graves were all isolated.The practice of cremation has caused the disappearance of a great part of theprecious objects buried with the dead.Whoever the people of the stone age may have been, Pcask and Nilsson believethat the whole of Denmark was occupied by Lapp tribes in prehistoric times.Others, on the contrary, hold that the Finnish Lapps reached the peninsulas andsouthern isles of Scandinavia only in erratic groups. In any case it is certainthat the country has at some time been occupied by races of very different originfrom its present Norse inhabitants. The comparative study of the crania made bySasse in the Sjalland graveyards shows that till the sixteenth centurya people ofvery feeble cranial capacity here held its ground by the side of the large-headedFrisic stock. Some articles of dress would also seem to suggest the presence ofold Celtic peoples, the peculiar head-dress till recently worn by the peasant womenin Fyen, iErti, and Falster presenting a striking resemblance to that of theAntwerp peasantry.After the subsidence of the mighty waves of migration which drove the