bordered on each other in the North, and that they here formed the first population of the northern part of Europe.
Hence it would naturally be believed that the inhabitants of Denmark, during the stone-period, were either Fins or Celts. Of the Fins we are told by Tacitus, who lived in the first century after the birth of Christ, that they were extremely rude and poor. They possessed neither weapons, horses, nor houses. They fed on roots, clothed themselves in the skins of beasts, and spread their couch on the bare earth. Their sole resource was their arrows, to which, from the want of iron, they affixed points of bone. Even their children had no refuge from storm and shower; they were merely covered with branches of trees twined in each other. This description of the mode of life of the Fins, agrees in every essential particular, with that contained in all other ancient records. As the inhabitants of Denmark, during the stone-period, were not acquainted with the use of any metal, but lived by hunting and fishing, the opinion has often been expressed that those ancient inhabitants of Denmark were Fins, and hence that all the Cromlechs, Giants' chambers, and antiquities of stone, were memorials of this aboriginal Finnish population. As a farther proof, appeal is made to the circumstance that stone implements, of the same kind, are often found in all the three northern kingdoms of Scandinavia, consequently that the whole of Scandinavia has been inhabited by the same race, and what people could it be but the Fins, who have inhabited Sweden, and Norway, from the earliest times.
Such a conclusion is, however, by no means to be relied on. It is quite evident that the circumstance of implements of stone, which bear great similarity to each other, having been discovered in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, by no means justifies us in concluding that such implements were used by the same people. For since implements of stone, which are perfectly similar, occur in Japan, in America, in the South Sea islands, and elsewhere, we must, in case we adopt that conclusion, necessarily assume that branches of the same race,
