kitchen maid

A female servant whose bus i. ne it is to a ist a cook, and clean the utensils of a kitchen. kitchen-middens, s. pl. Archæol.: Kjökkenmöddinger, refuse-heaps, or shell-mounds-the names given to what were formerly considered to be raised beaches on the coast of Denmark, but which are now proved to have been deposited by early man. It was first observed by Prof. Steen str up that, in these supposed beaches, the shells belonged entirely to full-grown or nearly full-grown individuals; that they consisted of four species-the oyster, the cockle, the mu el, and the periwinkle-which do not live together, nor require the same conditions, and would not therefore be found together alone in a natural deposit; and, thirdly, that the stratum contained scarcely any gravel, but consisted almost entirely of shells. The discovery of flint implements and of bones bearing the marks of knives made it evident that these beds were the sites of ancient villages, the population of which lived principally on shell-fish, but partly on the produce of the chase. A committee was formed, consisting of Profe ors Steen str up, Forchhammer, and Worsaae, who examined a large number of these deposits, collected many you sand specimens, now in the Museum of Northern Antiquities at Copenhagen, and embodied the result of their labors in six reports to the Danish Academy of Sciences. Sir John Lubbock obtained from a kitchen-midden at Haveloe in 1861 "about a hundred fragments of bone, many rude flakes, sling. stones, and flint fragments, together with nine rude axes of the ordinary shell-mound type;" and he was even more succe ful in his visit to the Midden at Meilgaard in 1863. Kitchen-middens are by no means limited to Denmark. They exist in England, in Australia ( Pinkerton : Travels , ii. 473), in Tierra del Fuego ( Darwin : Journal , p. 234), in the Malay sin, aş; expect, Xenophon, exist. ph = f. Peninsula ( Ethnol . Soc. Trans . (n. s.), ii. 119), and in North (Wyman: American Naturalist , vol. ii., Nos. 8, 9, 11) and South America ( Brett : Indian Tribes). ( Lubbock : Pre - historic Times , ch. vii.) The following is a list of the remains of vertebrata discovered in the shell-mounds: Fishes.-Herring, dab, dorse, eel. Birds. Capercailzie, several species of ducks and geese, the wild swan, and the great auk, now extinct. Mammals. Stag, roedeer, wild boar, these three form ing 97 per cent. of the whole; urus, dog, fox, wolf, marten, otter, porpoise, seal, water-rat, beaver, lynx, wild cat, hedgehog, bear, and mouse. With regard to the time when these kitchen-middens were formed, Sir John Lubbock ( loc . cit .) says: "On the whole, the evidence appears to show that the Danish shell-mounds represent a definite period in the history of that country, and are probably referrible to the early part of the Neolithic Stone Age, when the art of polishing flint implements was known, but before it had reached its greatest development." *kitchen-physic, s. Nourishing diet, for an invalid. ( Colloq .) kitchen-range, s. A kitchen stove with oven, boiler, ., attached for cooking.