Wichita eagle., 1890-02-13
PEOPLE THAT CESAR KNEW.
The First and Last of the Lake Dwellers
nf Sutherland.

| of Switzerland.
| The recent discovery of toynbS Of the lake
| dSs.llers has awakened a renewed interest in
the people of prehistoric Sutherland Tour
| lists will hardly be content any more To pass
| tbrouob Switzerland without visiting one or
| more of the museums where the collections
| made from the excavated Lake dwellings, are
| exhibited.
Perhaps the most extensive exhibition OF
| these relics is the one at the Helm house, In
| Enrich There one sees what are in fact the
| greatest antiquities of the whole world. There
! are hundreds and thousands of specimens of
stone. wood, cloth, weapons ard ornaments
| of a people whose towns were old a thousand
years before gray, old excavated Pompen was
ever thought Of.
To Professor Ferdinand Keller before all
others the world is indebted for a knowledge
| of what it probably was before the time of
| history All the later years of his life were
devoted TO the investigation of the lake dwell
ers' villages. and no man was so competent
as he 70 rcjuvenate those dead old skulls and
relics, lifting thousand years from the for
gotten past into the middle of the Nineteenth
century.
Keller has translated the hierogiyphics of
the dead ages. He has explained how the
antiquarians have divided all the prehistoric
past into the ages Of stone, of bronze and Of
iron: how the lake dwellings of Switzerland
were first discovered at Meilen, on the lake
OF Zurich, in 1929, and more fully revealed
in 1851 and how the world at large shut
its eyes, almost, to the great contribution
made to history. He has told, too, how the
patient hard working investigators, of whom
he is chief. have uncovered and dug out
enough of these buried towns to prove that
our ''best families don't need TO break off
their ancestral line with William the Con-
queror or with any other William. Those
of us who think we might be proud Of our
far off progenitors may yet be gratified to
see some shrewd Yankee following our line
clear back to Orgetorix, the youngest OIL
spring of our Celtic grandfathers of the lake
dwellers.
If our American tourist will take little
more time, jump on the cars, and ride out to
Robenhausen, on the lake of Pfatfikon, he
will there witness with his own eyes the turf
beds and the lake giving up the secrets Of
the age of stone. Robenhausen is town Of
the stone age period. 1t was perhaps 200
feet square, standing Oh platform built on
a hundred Thousand piles driven into the
bottom of the shallow lake, about 800 yards
from the shore Like all the other Swiss Lake
towns it was connected with the land by
long bridge, also built on piles. OF course
the visitor now will seq little except chopped
off piles sticking in the peat, and among them
the debris of the villages that have gone to
ruin Robenirausen had been partly burned
down and built up again on the same site, but
at intervals Of ages, probably, apart; SO that
fba bod
of piles. one above the other. The only way
of Judging of the probable age OF these lake
dwellings is by estimating the centuries re-
CURED for peat beds TO form. Reckoned in
this manner. the age of the first town built at
the bottom of Robenhausen must be pro-
digious.
In these lake villages once lived people as
much civilized, possibly, as are the Mexcans
of today. They titled the soil, they dweit in
houses, they wove fins linen, they had articles
of luxury, and traded more or less with other
countries. OF them there are no written an
nails. History stops stock still with Switzer
land only sixty years further back than the
birth of Christ. The nearest reference there
is in history to these Swiss lake dwellers is
where Cesar tells how a quarter Of a million
armed Heivetians, under Divico, burned down
their homes and marched into Gaul. Caesar
himself, after great battling defeated them,
and drove them back into their own country.
There is now much reason to believe that
these Helvetians We're the last of the lake
jewellers. 1t is known that most of the lake
villages were destroyed by fire, and it is alto
gether probable that when Cesar compelled
the people to return they established new
homes on the shore instead of rebuilding
their lake dwellings, which they had left in
search of a SUMMER cline and more grateful
soil than We're found amid the Alps THE
Lake Dwellers," by S. II. Nj. Byers, in Har-
per's Magazine.