Danish Peat and Shell-mounds or Kitchen-middens.—Sometimes we obtain evidence, without the aid of a change of level, of events which took place in pre-historic times. The combined labours, for example, of the antiquary, zoologist, and botanist have brought to light many monuments of the early inhabitants buried in peat-mosses in Denmark. Their geological age is determined by the fact that, not only the contemporaneous fresh-water and land shells, but all the quadrupeds, found in the peat, agree specifically with those now inhabiting the same districts, or which are known to have been indigenous in Denmark within the memory of man. In the lower beds of peat (a deposit varying from 20 to 30 feet in thickness), weapons of stone accompany trunks of the Scotch fir, _Pinus sylvestris._ This peat may be referred to that part of the stone period for which Sir John Lubbock proposed the name of “Neolithic”[1] in contradistinction to a still older era, termed by him “Paleolithic,” and which will be described in the sequel. In the higher portions of the same Danish bogs, bronze implements are associated with trunks and acorns of the common oak. It appears that the pine has never been a native of Denmark in historical times, and it seems to have given place to the oak about the time when articles and instruments of bronze superseded those of stone. It also appears that, at a still later period, the oak itself became scarce, and was nearly supplanted by the beech, a tree which now flourishes luxuriantly in Denmark. Again, at the still later epoch when the beech-tree abounded, tools of iron were introduced, and were gradually substituted for those of bronze. On the coasts of the Danish islands in the Baltic, certain mounds, called in those countries “Kjökken-mödding,” or “kitchen-middens,” occur, consisting chiefly of the castaway shells of the oyster, cockle, periwinkle, and other eatable kinds of molluscs. The mounds are from three to ten feet high, and from 100 to 1000 feet in their longest diameter. They greatly resemble heaps of shells formed by the Red Indians of North America along the eastern shores of the United States. In the old refuse-heaps, recently studied by the Danish antiquaries and naturalists with great skill and diligence, no implements of metal have ever been detected. All the knives, hatchets, and other tools, are of stone, horn, bone, or wood. With them are often intermixed fragments of rude pottery, charcoal and cinders, and the bones of quadrupeds on which the rude people fed. These bones belong to wild species still living in Europe, though some of them, like the beaver, have long been extirpated in Denmark. The only animal which they seem to have domesticated was the dog.