Our viands

It is not, however, till we come to the Bronze age that oats are found among the cereals in use, thus indicating progress, not only in the art of tool-making, but also in that of agriculture. Between the age of the earliest cave-dwellers and the earliest of the Swiss Lake dwellers archaeologists place the well- known 'kitchen-middens' of Denmark, upon which Sir Charles Lyell based so strong an argument in favour of the antiquity of man, but although these relics show a decided advancement upon those of the primitive cave-men here and elsewhere, no trace can be found in them of even the rudiments of agricultural knowledge. It may indeed be said by some, that difference of climate may account for this want of agricultural knowledge in the Danish savages, who have left their refuse heaps to show us what they ate 22 OUR VIANDS and what were their occupations, and that whilst these kitchen-middens were accumulating in Denmark, and the stalagmite slowly sealing down the records of early man in Kent's Cavern and elsewhere, that in other more favoured spots men were tilling the soil, gathering in their harvests of wheat and barley, grinding their corn, and making their bread; and undoubtedly this may have been the case, because the beginning of agriculture cannot be traced, and the first glimpses we get of the art in the Swiss Lake dwell- ings show it already in an advanced stage; and since it seems certain that man did not originate either in England or Denmark, but made his way thither by slow degrees, at a period when the conformation of land and sea differed widely from that with which we are now so familiar ; there- fore during this slow advance of mankind from his primeval home to the utmost bounds of the universe, those remaining in the original cradle of the race would have had time to progress in civilisation, and to attain skill in those arts which can only be successfully practised in settled com- munities; nevertheless, the extreme antiquity of the art even in Britain, is testified by traces of furrows found beneath peat-bogs in Scotland where now corn will not grow, and may be seen in Cornwall also, among those heaps of metallic waste which are now looked upon as hopelessly barren ; but who these early agriculturists were, and at what time they lived, is an unsolved problem. If, however, we turn to Eastern lands, to the records of the earliest of historians, we shall find agriculture in a state of great advancement. Before the days of Moses, not only was wheaten bread in common use, but the art of leavening it was also well known. At that period Egypt BREAD 23