of Prasias, whose only communication with the shore was a narrow bridge. The town, of which the piles had been set up in the first instance by the common labour of the citizens, continually increased in size; for each citizen who took a wife was bound to bring three posts from the neighbouring forest of Orbelos, and to fix them in the lake; the number of wives was not limited. On these piles a common flooring of beams was placed, and each man built thereon his hut, communicating with the water by a trapdoor. They fastened the little children by a cord that they might not fall into the water. Horses and cattle were fed upon fish, which were so abundant in the lake that it was only necessary to open the trapdoor and let down a net, which was soon filled.' Hippocrates, in his treatise on Air, Water, and Places, tells us that the people settled on the banks of the Phasis (the river rendered famous by the Golden Fleece and the Expedition of the Argonauts) built houses of wood and reeds on piles in the middle of the marshes; their health, he adds, is much impaired by this way of life. 6 Even to this day, and in the same place, the inhabitants build their dwellings as in the time of Hippocrates. Virchow further informs us, on the authority of the traveller Maurice Wagner, that the town of Redout-Kaleh, on the Chopi, is composed of two long rows of wooden huts. These huts, which are hardly larger and more spacious than the booths at Frankfort fair, rest on piles raised a foot above the marshy soil. The same is true of NovoTscherkask, the capital of the Cossacks of the Don.' (Virchow, Revue des cours scientifiques,' 1866, vol. iv. p. 10.) 6 In modern times we know of a number of places where habitations are constructed more or less resembling the lake cities of ancient Helvetia. Without speaking of the Papuans of New Guinea, who at the present day build their houses precisely after the fashion of the Pæonians, the persistence of this same mode of construction among the inhabitants of the banks of the Phasis, and even among the Cossacks of the Don, is worthy of remark. Very LAKE HUTS IN COCHIN CHINA. 123 similar habitations occur also in various parts of Oceania, in Borneo, in the Islands of Ceram and Mindanao, &c. Dumont d'Urville saw at Tondano, in the Island of Celebes, a town now almost entirely destroyed, private dwellings supported on piles artistically carved, and representing men and animals. He tells us that Tondano is a compound word, signifying man of the water, and that the houses of FIG. 36. MODERN LAKE DWELLINGS OF THE INHABITANTS OF NEW this town bore a striking resemblance to the reed huts and marsh dwellings of la Vendée, his native country. In the port of Doreï in New Guinea certain houses, or sanctuaries consecrated to the gods, are raised on piles representing naked human figures. In many tribes the ordinary houses are also built in like manner (fig. 36). The interior of Africa is still too little known to enable us to mention many lake dwellings in that country. The practice of building above the surface of the water seems however to have taken root there, at least along the banks of the Niger, the Zambesi, and the Tsadda. In Cochin China, the present inhabitants of Camboja (placed under the protectorate of France in 1864), 'live,' Dr. Noulet tells us, 'in bamboo huts supported on piles, not only along the banks of the rivers, but also on land, and even in the vast forests which cover the interior of the country, and in places where there can be no risk of floods.'1 With regard to America, we know that in order more surely to avoid hostile attacks, the Aztecs raised their houses of cane and reed on piles, planted among a group of low and marshy islands, which they afterwards connected by dikes protected by palisades. Such was the origin of Mexico, which resembles at once, as we see, the FIG. 37. TRANSVERSE SECTION OF AN IRISH CRANNOGE. (After Lubbock.) crannoges of Ireland (fig. 37) and the lake dwellings of Switzerland. Lastly, on their arrival in the New World, the Spaniards saw on the lagoon of Maracaïbo a kind of village entirely built on piles, a little wooden Venice,' says Elisée Réclus, to which one of the republics of Columbia owes at the present day its name Venezuela. In the same way the floating islands 2 of the ancient Assyrians and Chinese had, or have still, their parallels in Mexico, in those floating gardens which the first historians of the conquest describe with enthusiasm, and which were a species of raft covered 1 Dr. Noulet, L'âge de la pierre polie et du bronze au Cambodge, d'après les découvertes de M. J. Moura, lieutenant de vaisseau, représentant du protectorat français au Cambodge, in the archives of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse, 1879, p. 6, first report. 2 On the Assyrian bas-reliefs are to be seen artificial islands formed of great reeds, interlaced with one another, and which served as dwellings to the wealthy men of the time of Nineveh and Babylon. THE NURAGHI OF SARDINIA. 125 with soil, bearing houses surrounded by the fairest flowers and the richest vegetation. According to M. Desor, the Isle of Roses, in the lake of Starnberg in Bavaria, is only an artificial island dating from the stone age, and inhabited from that time down to our own day. At this very day a castle rises in the midst of its cool shade.1 VI. THE NURAGHI OF SARDINIA. The Nuraghi are perhaps the most curious monuments of the stone age. Those cyclopean constructions, which have withstood the wear of centuries, and which, scattered almost in profusion throughout Sardinia (the Abbate Spano has counted more than 40,000 of them), still rear their imposing mass before the wondering eyes of the traveller and of the archæologist. There is no doubt that they were the cradle and home of the primitive races who settled in the island in the remote past. The labours of the learned Abbate Giovanni Spano 2 have proved beyond dispute that we have here one of the earliest examples of the natural formation of a society by men after they have abandoned the nomadic life of hunters. Here, as Mantegazza has happily expressed it, We may read a page of history written by an ancient people over the whole face of Sardinia.' What this people was, we do not know. Spano supposes them to have come from the plains of Shinar at the time of the great emigration which dispersed the tribes of Chaldea through Persia, Palestine, Greece, Italy, and Northern Europe. The first comers grouped their dwellings in the most favourable sites for combined resistance in case of a hostile invasion. By degrees, as the chiefs of the tribes grew more powerful, as the family increased, the dwellings became more numerous. New comers built others; and here we find the explanation of the fact that all the Nuraghi are not equally well built, E. Desor, Les Palafittes ou constructions lacustres du lac de Neufchâtel, p. 11. Paris, 1865. 2 See Giovanni Spano, Paleontologia sarda, ossia l'età prehistorica segnata nei monumenti che si trovano in Sardegna. Cagliari, 1871. the earliest being constructed simply of natural masses, which had been detached from the neighbouring rocks and lay scattered upon the ground, while those of a later date are built of hewn stone, al though the ma FIG. 38. A SARDINIAN NURAGHI OF THE EARLIEST EPOCH. sonry still re'mains rude. The former belong to the stone age, the latter to that of bronze. They are all in the form of a truncated cone. Some have only one room; others two, and sometimes even three, one above the other. In the interior of these there is a winding stair made of enormous blocks placed at an acute FIG. 39. VERTICAL SECTION OF THE angle in the thickness of the wall, leading to the upper chamber. Others again have an outer wall enclosing a triangular or polygonal space, with an apartment of the same form as the Nuraghi at each angle. These rooms communicate with each other by vaulted passages of which the roof is almost always pointed. Each layer of stone is laid without mortar (figs. 38 and 39). The interior consists sometimes of a great room with a conical roof, and capable of containing forty or fifty people.' The vaulted roof is built of uniform The Nuraghi te tirola of the land of Botolana scrves as a shelter in |