Now you see how these people seem to have lived: first the old stone age men, then those of the newer or polished stone age, and lastly the lake-dwellers. The people of both the first and second stone ages certainly saw the mammoth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, lion, and reindeer alive in France, Switzerland, and England; but when the lake-dwellings were built, all these animals, except perhaps the reindeer, had died, and most of the animals were the same as they are now. None of these people have left us any kind of history whatever, except that which their simple works tell us, their flint and bone weapons, and their dwellings. They have set up no gigantic monuments like the Egyptians or the Druids. They thought of no men to come after them who would take an interest in their ways; but it is fortunate that what they did make was of such lasting materials as stone and flint, or we should have known next to nothing about their lives. It is impossible to say how many thousands of years may have passed before the rough stone weapons were replaced by the polished stone, or the cave was exchanged for an artificial house in a lake; but you must feel in your minds that the time was immense, and the more we study the ways and works of pre-historic man, the more certain we become that it is longer than the whole time that has passed since men first began to use any kind of writing. KITCHEN-MIDDENS. I dare say you have seen untidy people in country places, and even in towns, throw oyster-shells and broken dishes and dirt outside their doors until quite a heap is formed. This is called a “midden,” and the habit of doing this is a very old one. We learn just a little more of the history of man from great middens made by ancient people in several countries. They were first discovered in Denmark, and since then they have been found in Scotland, Brazil, and New Zealand. They are sometimes very large, and must have been used by the whole village as places to throw the refuse of their cookery in. When these heaps have been dug into all sorts of things have been found in them—the shells of oysters and mussels, bones of fishes, birds, and animals, pieces of broken earthenware, little ornaments, stone axes, arrow-heads, wood ashes, burnt bones, and other odds and ends. In Brazil many of these kitchen-middens are on the sea shore, and it seems as if the people who made them came there to live on the shell-fish, for the shells are the same as those living in the sea close by now. In New Zealand the middens contain many of the bones of the Moa, which was described in “The Animal Part,” and has now perished, and these are cracked in such a manner that the people evidently wanted to get at the marrow in them, and it shows too that this gigantic bird was common in New Zealand then. The midden makers seemed to have lived in the open air, and wherever food was most plentiful. Perhaps they built huts of the