Caraway seeds (Garum carui).
Apples (Pyrus malus, L.)
Pears (Pyrus communis, L.)
Bullace plums (Prunus institia, L.)
The cereals are of Mediterranean habit, and have been used by the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans from the earliest times. Two weeds also which grew in the cornfields, the common blue corn-bottle (Centaurea cyanus, L.) and the Cretan catchfly (Silene cretica), are indigenous in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy. The small-leaved flax is also a native of Southern Europe.
It is remarkable that the seeds of the wild plants found in the lake-dwellings are absolutely identical with those of the present time; while the seeds of the plants under cultivation have been improved by the care of man in the many centuries which separate the Neolithic age from our own times.
It is therefore evident that in the fields, gardens, and orchards the pile-dwellers possessed vegetables not traceable to wild stocks now growing in Switzerland; and it is certain, from the researches of Professor Heer, that the foreign stocks have been derived from Southern Europe or from Asia Minor. They show that agriculture was probably first invented in the warmer regions of the south and east, and that the knowledge of it was afterwards introduced into northern, western, and central Europe.
The Shell-Mounds of Denmark.
The discoveries made in the refuse-heaps of Denmark by Prof. Steenstrup, and others,[1] reveal to us a state of
- ↑ Steenstrup, Sur les Kjokkenmoddings de l'Age de la Pierre, Congres. Int. Archéol. Préhist. Copenhague, 1869. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times
