Other of the palaces are fine examples of the severer Classic work of the eighteenth century erected when Europe had learned to call barbaric all that the Christian centuries had raised, so ceased merely to apply Classical details to Gothic designs, and could admire nothing but plain copies of the work of Greece and Rome. The Amalienborg (Winter Palace, etc.) surrounds a fine octagonal court with Ionic pilasters, balustrades and urns, over which rise high tiled roofs. In the centre of the court is a metal statue to King Frederick V., famed as the patron of science and art. It was erected by the Asiatic Trading Company which once made Denmark an Indian power, for the king's interest in the East was great, and he dispatched Niebuhr to Arabia in 1761.[63] Another eighteenth century palace, called Prindsens because the Crown Prince adorned it when in 1744 it was erected round its court, is now the National Museum. Even in the earliest age when "beasts were slaying men" Denmark was the abode of oyster-eating humanity which has left us the world-famed kitchen middens that make so fascinating to us the first beginnings of our race. This collection is of extraordinary interest as letting us trace in a general way the whole story of mankind from the time when he chipped flints into implements and built cromlechs of unshapen stones to the days when he learned to preach the message of peace from pulpits of Renaissance architecture and to shoot his fellows with long guns. As is natural in Denmark the collection of prehistoric implements is extremely representative and large. We see man armed with rude axes of flint or variegated marble and women adorned with amber beads, during the long, long millenniums of the two ages of stone. We see the swords and knives and the tree-trunk coffins of those who had learned the secret of the metals and substituted for stone first blunt bronze and then sharp iron. We see the works of Egypt and Assyria, of Greece and Rome, and of all the cultured races of the South. We see the beginning of civilisation in the North and the spoils of the Viking Age, the gold and jewels brought to Denmark by foray or by trade. We see the North becoming Christian and building churches of stone or staves and the Scandinavian countries moulding themselves into what they are to-day.[64] For purely educational purposes and for stimulating the imagination few museums on earth have quite the same power as this one.[65]