not only had tame oxen, pigs, goats, and geese,[11] but also sowed and planted, and lived the life of an agricultural race; nor will it be said that such an advance was extraordinary when we say that the minimum duration of the age of polished stone in central Europe was probably two thousand years. Other relics from the mounds, not less interesting than the weapons, are their vessels of pottery; for here we see the earliest traces of another art. This pottery is of a black colour, curiously mixed with powdered shells, perhaps to strengthen the clay, perhaps for ornament. Its pottery belongs to the latter portion of this age of stone, a period distinguished not only by the use of domestic animals, but also by the growth of cereals. We have said that bones of cattle, swine, and in one case of a goose, have been found among the refuse of the funeral feasts. But man was still a hunter, as he is to this day, though he had found other means of support besides the wild game; so we also find the bones of the red deer and the wild bull, both of which supplied him with food. Wolves’ teeth, too, have been found pierced, so as to be strung into a necklace; for personal adornment formed, in those days as now, part of the interest of life. Jet beads have been discovered in large numbers, and even some of amber, which seems to have been brought from the Baltic to these countries and as far south as Switzerland; and it is known that during the last portion of what is, nevertheless, still the stone period, the most precious metal of all, gold, was used for ornament. Gold is the one metal which is frequently found on the surface of the ground, and therefore it was naturally the first to come under the eye of man. The religion of the mound-builders probably consisted in part of the worship of the dead, so that the very tombs themselves, and not the cromlechs only, were a sort of temples. And yet they had the deepest dread of the reappearance of the departed upon earth--of his ghost. To prevent his ‘walking’ they adopted a strange practical form of exorcism. They strewed the ground at the grave’s mouth with sharp stones or broken pieces of pottery, as though a ghost could have his feet cut, and by fear of that be kept from returning to his old haunts. For ages and ages after the days of the mound-builders the same custom lived on of which we here see the rise. The same ceremony--turned now to an unmeaning rite--was used for the graves of those, such as murderers or suicides, who might be expected to sleep uneasily in their narrow house. This is the custom which is referred to in the speech of the priest to Laertes.[12] Ophelia had died under such suspicion of suicide, that it was a stretch of their rule, he says, to grant her Christian burial. ‘And but the great command o’ersways our order, She should in ground unsanctified have lodged To the last trumpet: for charitable prayers, Shards, flints and pebbles, should be thrown on her.’