With regard to their age, the case is not quite so easily settled. Except such monuments as those of Gorm and Thyra, and one or two others, to be mentioned hereafter, few can produce such proof of their age as would stand investigation in a court of law. But when all the traditions, all the analogies, and all the probabilities of the case are examined, they seem to make up such an accumulation of evidence as is irresistible; and the whole appears to present an unbroken and intelligible sequence which explains everything. The proof of all this, however, does not rest on the evidence of two or three, or even of a dozen, of instances, but is based upon the multiplication of a great number of coincidences derived from a large number of instances, which taken together in the cumulative form, make up a stronger body of proof than could be obtained from the direct testimony of one or two cases. To appreciate this, however, the whole must be taken together. To try to invalidate it by selecting one or two prominent cases, where the proof is manifestly insufficient when taken by itself, is to misunderstand and misrepresent the whole force of the argument. One point, I fancy, there will be very little difficulty in proving, which is, that the whole form one continuous group, extending in an unbroken series, from the earliest to the latest. There is no hiatus or break anywhere; and if some can be proved to belong to the 10th century, it is only a question how far you can, by extenuating the thread, extend it backwards. It can hardly be much beyond the Christian era. It seems that such a date satisfies all the known conditions of the problem, in so far as the Stone Monuments at least are concerned. There is, so far as I know at present, absolutely no evidence on the other side, except what is derived from the Danish system of the three ages: if that is established as a rule of law, _cadit questio_, there is no more to be said on the subject. But this is exactly what does not appear to have yet been established on any sufficient or satisfactory basis. There need be no difficulty in granting that men used stone and bone for implements, before they were acquainted with the use of the metals. It may also be admitted, that they used bronze before they learned the art of extracting iron from its ores. But what is denied is, that they abandoned the use of these primitive implements on the introduction of the metals; and it is contended that they employed stone and bone simultaneously with bronze and iron, down to a very late period. The real fact of the case seems to be, that the people on the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, were as remote from the centres of civilization on the Mediterranean and to the eastward of it in the earlier centuries of our era, and were as little influenced by them, as the inhabitants of the islands in the Pacific and Arctic America were by Europe in the last century. In the remote corners of the world,