China and
Britain. Owing to its extreme hardness and susceptibility to polish,
it was highly prized by the neolithic races for the manufacture of
stone axes and hammers. In nearly every European country implements of
jade belonging to the primitive inhabitants have been discovered. Some
of the most beautiful belonged to one of the latest settlements of the
stone age at Gerlafingen, in the Lake of Bienne, and were mixed with
bronze celts of primitive type, indicating that the people of these
lake-dwellings lived during the transition period between stone and
bronze.

The presence of such celts made of jade obviously points to a
connection at a very early period with the East, from whence the stone
must have been brought, for it has never been found in a natural state
west of the Caspian. An interesting controversy upon this subject was
created about eight years ago by the finding in the bed of the Rhone
of a jade strigil, an instrument curved and hollowed like a spoon used
to scrape the skin while bathing. Various conjectures were formed as
to how this isolated object could have found its way from its distant
quarry in the East to this obscure spot among the Alps. Professor Max
Mueller, and those who along with him advocate the Oriental origin of
the first settlers in Europe, are of opinion that this strigil and the
various jade implements found in the Swiss lake-dwellings, are relics
of this Western migration from the primitive cradle of the Aryan race
on the plateaus of Central Asia. The implements could only have come
from the East, for the other sources of jade supply in New Zealand and
America--since discovered--were altogether unknown in those primitive
times. And this conclusion is supported by an imposing array of
concurrent philological evidence, based upon the resemblances between
the Aryan languages of Europe, so strangely akin to each other, and
the ancient dialects of India and Persia. But plausible as this
argument looks, the more probable explanation is that the inhabitants
of Europe obtained the material which they laboriously fashioned into
tools from the East, according to a system of barter similar to that
which still exists amongst tribes more rude and savage than the Swiss
lake-dwellers. Numerous facts of a like tendency are on record, such
as the finding in the mounds of the Mississippi valley, side by side,
obsidian from Mexico and mica from the Alleghanies, and in the mounds
around the great nor