And not recoil from the dismaying sense
Of human impotence?”
In looking back through the pages of history we arrive at a period when all written records cease; but the remains of the dwellings of man, of his arts and industries, enable us to trace out in some degree the general routine of his every-day life. In the matter now under consideration, prehistoric archæology interests chiefly as demonstrating, in a practical manner, the state of the people who occupied Erin long before the beginning of authentic history. Recent researches enable us to lift the veil that heretofore concealed the past of subsided lake-dwellings in Ireland, to bid
“Forgotten generations live again,
Assume the bodily shapes they wore of old”;
to realize to a great extent the physical past of their inhabitants, and in imagination to partake of their daily life. If till lately the learned were on this subject purblind, it is the less surprising that the uncultured fisherman, gliding in his skiff over the placid surface of the waters and peering into the clear depths, should have failed to recognize that the mouldering stems projecting from the oozy bottom were traces of the love of security of his forefathers, that in the muddy matrix of the ever-accumulating lacustrine deposit, are preserved material evidence of a state of society long since passed away.
Until the first half of this nineteenth century all memory of the ancient lake-dwellers of Ireland seemed to have vanished completely, but with the study of ethnology the interest excited in tracing out the idiosyncrasies of the various races of man penetrated to Ireland also, and now “few things can be more interesting than the spectacle of an ancient, long-forgotten people, thus rising, as it were, from the waters of oblivion to take that place which properly belongs to it in the history of the human race.”[1] Beyond the limits of history and archæology there extends a boundless period of human existence. Far back in this indefinite past we catch glimpses of a shadowy race, the first dwellers in Erin, who, it may be fairly surmised, were in a very rude state—nomad hunters and fishers, subsisting by the chase, which they supplemented by indigenous wild fruits:
“Rugged type of primal man,
Grim utilitarian,
Loving woods for hunt and prowl,