The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1890-03-27
PEOPLE THAT CESAR KNEW.
Remains of the Inhabitants of Villages of
the Stone and Iron Ages.

The recent discoy7-y of tombs of the
lake dwellers has !: kened a renewed
interest in the pit ie OF prehistoric
Switzerland. Tou is will hardly be
content any morte' to pass through
Switzerland without visiting one or
more of the museums where the col
lections made from the eXcayated lake
dwellings are exhibited
Perhaps the most extensive exhibition
of these relics is the one at the Helm
House." in Zurich There one sees
what are in fact the greatest antiquities
of the whole world. There are hun
dreds and thousands of spscHNchs of
stone. wood cloth, weapons and orna-
ments, of \ people whose towns We're
old thousand years before gray old
excavated Pompeii was ever thought
of.
TO Professor Ferdinand Keller before
all others the world is iGdebted for. a
knowledge of what it probably wassbe-
fore the time Of history. All the later
years of his life were devoted to the in
vestigation of the lake dwellers'
villages, and no man was so competent
as he to rejuvenatn those dead old
skulls and relics, ting thousand
years from the forg 4@ten past into the
middle of the ninet ith century.
Keller has transla. q the hieroglyph-
les 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 re-
vealed 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 Conquerer, or with any
other William. Those of us who think
we might be proud of our far-otf pro-
genitors may yet be gratified to see
some shrewd Yankee following our
line clear back to Orgetorix, the
youngest offspring of our Celtic grand
fathers of the lake dwellers.
If our American tourist will take a
little more time, jump on the ears. and
ride out to Robenhansen, on the lake of
Pfaffikon, 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 a town of the
stone-age period. 1t was perhaps
twelve hundred feet square, standing
on a platform built on hundred
thousand piles driven into the bottom
of the shallow lake, about three hum
dred yards from the shore. Like all
the other Swiss lake towns it was con-
nected with the land by long bridge,
also built on piles Of course the
visitor now will see little except
chopped-of piles sticking in the peat,
and among them the debris of the vii
lagos that have gone to ruin. Roben-
hansen had been partly burned down
at intervals of ages. probably, apart,
so that the peat bed shows on being
opened three sets of piles, one above
the other. The only way of Judging of
the probable age of these lake dwell
ings is by estimating the centuries re-
luired for peat beds to form. Reck-
oned in this manner, the age of the first
town built at the bottom of Roben-
hausen must be prodigious.
In these lake villages once lived a
people as much civilized, possibly. as
are the MeXicans of to-day. They
titled the soil. they dwelt in houses,
they wove fine linen, they had articles
of luxury, and traded more or less with
other countries. OF them there are no
written ANIMALS. History stops stock
still with Switzerland only sixty years
farther back than the birth of Christ.
The nearest reference there is in history
to these Swiss lake dwellerS is where
Cesar tells how Il quarter of a million
armed Helvetians, 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 were the last of
the lake dwellers. 1t is known that
most of the lake villages were de-
stroyed by fire, and it is altogether
probable that when Caesar compelled
the people to return they established
new homes on the shore, instead of re-
building their lake dwellings, which
they had left in search of SUMMER
cline and more grateful soil than
were found amid the Alps. IA. III.
Byers, In Harper's Magazine.