Cranoges, or wooden islands, are chiefly found in Ireland and Scotland. They differ from the fascine constructions in that they frequently were built on natural islands, or on shallows approaching to this character. The huts built upon these pile-constructions were rectangular; some may have been round, like the huts of savages, in imitation of mole-hills, the prototypes of the numerous mounds strewn all over the globe. The huts contained an artificial hearth, made of three or four slabs of stone. That the inhabitants of the lake-dwellings were acquainted with textile art, is proved by the discovery of an innumerable quantity of clay-weights for weaving purposes, and by pieces of burnt woven flax. The crude pottery, tools and wooden pegs, fibres twisted into ropes, remains of different cereals, fruits, and domestic animals found in these settlements, clearly prove that a certain kind of family life must have existed. At all events, the inhabitants must have reached a higher degree of civilisation than some of the South-Sea Islanders of our century, who, on receiving some iron nails, planted them, in the expectation of reaping a rich crop of this valuable vegetable. We see that in pre-historic times art was already practised, not only for a merely utilitarian but also for an ornamental and artistic purpose. This may be said, in a much higher sense, of the pre-historic art-remains in the Western hemisphere. Art had there a threefold development, corresponding to the three groups of humanity. We find the mounds of the Negro; the pottery of the yellow man, with its quaint ornamentation; and the remarkable temples, fortresses, viaducts, and aqueducts of the Aryan group. We possess in our museums abundant specimens of the works of these three groups, as also of their singular hieroglyphic writings, resembling the first attempts of the Chinese and Egyptians to represent ideas in forms. Imagination with savages supplies the form; the mere outlines therefore suffice. The horse drawn in this way (_a_) is a real horse; (_b_) this forms a real goose; (_c_) this is the sun; and (_d_) this a real man. It is a kind of pictorial writing or ideography, to be seen for miles and miles hewn in rocks at Massaya, and practised by humanity at large, as by our own children, in the first stage of awakening consciousness. [Illustration] We find not only ethnological, but also philological and artistic traces of the fact, that at an unknown pre-historic period, the Western hemisphere must have been in close connection with the Eastern. The name of the supreme Divinity, Dyaus, Θεός {Theos}, Deus, is in the far West _Teotl_. Art in the _North_ of the Western hemisphere is primitive, kyklopean walls and sepulchral mounds being the principal remains.