Читать книгу Prehistoric Man - Daniel Sir Wilson - Страница 5

Table of Contents

THE LATEST MIGRATIONS—FOUNDING A CAPITAL—BEGINNINGS OF HISTORY—PREHISTORIC PHASES—NON-METALLURGIC ERAS—OSCILLATIONS OF THE LAND—THE GLACIAL PERIOD—FOSSIL MAMMALIA—THE FLINT-FOLK OF THE DRIFT—ADVENT OF EUROPEAN MAN—THE DRIFT IMPLEMENTS—CHRONOLOGY OF THE FRENCH DRIFT—SCOTTISH ALLUVIUM—PRECELTIC RACES—THEIR IMITATIVE ARTS—MAN PRIMEVAL—HIS INTELLECTUAL CONDITION—INSTINCT—ACCUMULATED KNOWLEDGE—PRIMEVAL BRITAIN—ITS FOSSIL FAUNA—OSSIFEROUS CAVES—BRIXHAM CAVE—SCOTTISH REINDEER—AMERICAN DRIFT—RELICS OF ANCIENT LIFE—EXTINCT FAUNA—MAN AND THE MASTODON—INDIAN TRADITIONS—GIANTS—DRIFT DISCLOSURES—AMERICAN CRANIAL TYPE—ANTIQUITY OF THE AMERICAN MAN—PRIMITIVE ARTS.

The striking contrasts which the New World presents, in nearly every respect, to the Old, are full of significance in relation to the origin of civilisation, and its influence on the progress of man. Viewed merely as the latest scene of migration of European races on a great scale, America has much to disclose in illustration of primitive history. There we see the land cleared of its virgin forest, the soil prepared for its first tillage, the site of the future city chosen, and the birth of the world’s historic capitals epitomised in those of the youngest American commonwealths. Taking our stand on one of the newest of these civic sites, let us trace the brief history of the political and commercial capital of Upper Canada.

Built along the margin of a bay, enclosed by a peninsular spit of land running out from the north shore of Lake Ontario, the city of Toronto rests on a drift formation of sand and clay, only disturbed in its nearly level uniformity by the rain-gullies and ravines which mark the courses of the rivulets that drain its surface. This the original projectors of the city mapped off into parallelograms, by streets uniformly intersecting each other at right angles; and in carrying out their plan, every ravine and undulation is smoothed and levelled, as with the indiscriminating precision of the mower’s scythe. The country rises to the north for about twenty miles, by a gradual slope to the water-shed between Ontario and Lake Simcoe, and then descends to the level of the northern lake and the old hunting-grounds of the Hurons. It is a nearly unvarying expanse of partially cleared forest: a blank, with its Indian traditions effaced, its colonial traditions uncreated. The cities of the old world have their mythic founders and quaint legends still commemorated in heraldic blazonry. But there is no mystery about the beginnings of Toronto. Upper Canada was erected into a distinct province in 1791, only eight years after France finally renounced all claim on the province of Quebec; and a few months thereafter General Simcoe, the first governor of the new province, arrived at the old French fort, at the mouth of the Niagara river, and in May 1793 selected the Bay of Toronto as the site of the future capital. The chosen spot presented a dreary aspect of swamp and uncleared pine forest; but amid these his sagacious eye saw in anticipation the city rise, which already numbers upwards of 60,000 inhabitants; and rejecting the old Indian name, since restored, he gave to his embryo capital that of York. Colonel Bouchette, Surveyor-General of Lower Canada, was selected to lay out the projected city and harbour; and he thus describes the locality as it then existed: “I still distinctly recollect the untamed aspect which the country exhibited when first I entered the beautiful basin. Dense and trackless forests lined the margin of the lake, and reflected their inverted images in its glassy surface. The wandering savage had constructed his ephemeral habitation beneath their luxuriant foliage, the group then consisting of two families of Mississagas; and the bay and neighbouring marshes were the hitherto uninvaded haunts of immense coveys of wild-fowl; indeed, they were so abundant as in some measure to annoy us during the night.”^[6]

The vicissitudes attending the progress of the Canadian city have been minutely chronicled by local historians, who record how many dwellings of round logs, squared timber, or more ambitious frame-houses exceeding a single story, were in existence at various dates. The first vessel which belonged to the town, and turned its harbour to account; the first brick house, the earliest stone one; and even the first gig of an ambitious citizen, subsequent to 1812, are all duly chronicled. Could we learn with equal truthfulness of the first years of the city built by Romulus on the Palatine Hill, its annals would tell no less homely truths, even now dimly hinted at in the legend of the scornful Remus leaping over its infant ramparts. Tiber’s hill was once the site only of the solitary herdsman’s hut; and an old citizen has described to me his youthful recollections of Toronto as consisting of a few log-huts in the clearing, and an Indian village of birch-bark wigwams, near the Don, with a mere trail through the woods to the old French fort, on the line where now upwards of two miles of costly stores, hotels, and public buildings mark the principal street of the busy city.

M. Theodore Pavi describes Toronto, in his Souvenirs Atlantiques, published at Paris in 1833, as still in the woods, a mere advanced post of civilisation on the outskirts of a boundless waste. “To the houses succeed immediately the forests, and how profound must be those immense forests, when we reflect that they continue without interruption till they lose themselves in the icy regions of Hudson’s Bay near the Arctic Pole.” Upwards of forty years have since elapsed, and that for New-World cities is an æon. Every year has witnessed more rapid strides, alike in the progress of Toronto, and in the clearing and settling of the surrounding country. Railways have opened up new avenues of trade and commerce, and borne troops of sturdy pioneers into the wilderness behind. So rapid has been the clearing of the forest, and so great the rise in the price of labour, that fuel, brought from the distant coal-fields of Pennsylvania, already undersells the cord-wood hewn in Canadian forests; and even Newcastle coal warms many a luxurious winter hearth. All is rife with progress. The new past is despised; the old past is unheeded; and for antiquity there is neither reverence nor faith. These are beginnings of history; and are full of significance to those who have wrought out some of the curious problems of an ancient past, amid historic scenes contrasting in all respects with this unhistoric but vigorous youth of the New World. The contrast between the new and the old is here sufficiently striking. Yet the old also was once new; had even such beginnings as this; and was as devoid of history as the rawest clearing of the Far West.

There are other aspects also in which a New World, thus entering on its historic life, is calculated to throw light on the origin of civilisation. Though neither its forests nor its aborigines are primeval, they realise for us just such a primitive condition as that in which human history appears to begin. In all the most characteristic aspects of the Indian, as well as in the traces of native American metallurgy, architecture, letters, and science, we find reproduced the same phases through which man passed in oldest prehistoric times; and when, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, we witness the mineral wealth of the Andes tempting European colonisation beyond the Atlantic, we only see the expeditions of new Argonauts; and realise incidents of the first voyage to the Cassiterides; or the planting of the infant colonies of Gadir, Massala, and Carthage by Phocian and Punic adventurers of the historic dawn. But the speculations of modern science carry us far beyond any dawn of definite history, even when research is directed to the evidence of man’s primitive arts, and the origin of his civilisation.

The investigation of the underlying chronicles of Europe’s most ancient human history has placed beyond question that its historic period was preceded by an unhistoric one of long duration, marked by a slow progression from arts of the rudest kind to others which involved the germs of all later development. From Europe, and the historic lands of Asia and Africa, we derive our ideas of man; and of the youngest of these continents, on which he has thus advanced from savage artlessness to the highest arts of civilisation, we have history, written or traditional, for at least two thousand years. But in the year 1492 a New World was discovered, peopled with its own millions, for the most part in no degree advanced beyond that primeval starting-point which lies far behind Europe’s oldest traditions. To have found there beings strange as the inhabitants of Swift’s Houyhnhnm’s Land, or the monsters conjured up in the philosophic day-dreams of Sir Humphry Davy for the peopling of other planets,^[7] would have seemed less wonderful to the men of that fifteenth century than what they did find: man in a state of savage infancy, with arts altogether rudimentary; language without letters, tradition without history, everything as it were but in its beginning, and yet himself looking back into a past even more vast and vague than their own. The significance of this state of things is worth inquiring into, if it be for nothing else than the light which the analogies of such a living present may throw on the infancy of Europe, and beyond that, on the primal infancy of the human race.

Recent discoveries of primitive art in the diluvial formations both of France and England have tended to add a fresh interest to the investigation of that “primeval stone-period” which underlies the most ancient memorials of Europe’s civilisation. The oldest of all written chronicles assigns a period of some duration in the history of the human race, during which man tilled the ground, pursued the chase, and made garments of its spoils, without any knowledge of the working in metals, on which the simplest of all known arts depend. Through such a primitive stage it had already appeared to me probable that all civilised nations had passed,^[8] before disclosures of a still older flint-period in the chroniclings of the drift added new significance to the term primeval, in its application to the non-metallurgic era of Europe’s arts.

The incredulity and even contempt with which the application of a system of archæological periods to the antiquities of Britain was received, in recent years, by a certain class of critics, was inevitable, from the exclusive attention previously devoted to Roman and medieval remains. But the attention of the antiquary, as well as the geologist, is now being directed to conclusions forced on both by the traces of man in the stratified gravel of post-pleiocene formations. The circumstances attending their repeated discovery place their remote antiquity beyond question. The difficulty indeed is to bring the phenomena illustrated by palæolithic relics of the quaternary period into any conceivable harmony with the limits of chronology as hitherto applied to man. The pre-Celtic architects of the British long-barrow, and the allophyliæ of the European stone age, are but men of yesterday in comparison with the Flint-Folk of the Drift. They belong to a lost Atlantis,—another continent, now in part at least buried beneath the ocean; and compared with which the Old World of history is as new as that found for it by Columbus.

The disclosures of geology have familiarised us with the conviction that the “stable land,” the “perpetual hills,” and the “everlasting mountains” are but figures of speech. But the idea forces itself on reluctant minds that man himself has witnessed the disappearance of Alpine chains and the submergence of continents. The Pacific archipelagos are but the mountain-crests of a southern continent, which in earlier ages may have facilitated the wanderings of the nations. The startling discoveries in the French and English drift are results of oscillations of the northern hemisphere, which, in times nearer to historic centuries, depressed the bed of the Baltic in the era of the Danish kjökkenmöddingr, and made dry land of the upper estuaries of the Forth and Clyde. It is doubtful, indeed, if the shallowing of Danish and Scottish seas by the rise of their ocean-beds is altogether a work of prehistoric times. The rise still going on in parts of the Swedish coast is a phenomenon long familiar to geologists; and the upheaval of the Scottish region, embracing the valleys of the Forth and Clyde, it now appears probable, has been protracted into historic times, and has even affected the relative levels of sea and land since the building of the Roman wall.

The changes thus witnessed on a comparatively small scale, on familiar areas, help us in some degree to estimate the vast physical revolutions that have taken place throughout the northern hemisphere within that recent geological period which succeeded the formation of the pleiocene strata. One of the most remarkable phenomena now recognised as affecting the conditions of life in recent geological epochs is the prolonged existence, throughout the whole northern hemisphere, of a temperature resembling that of the Arctic regions at the present time. After a period more nearly assimilating in climatic character to the tropics, though otherwise under varying conditions, the temperature of the whole northern hemisphere gradually diminished towards the end of the tertiary epoch, until the highlands of Scotland and Wales—then at a much higher elevation,—resembled Greenland at the present time, and an Arctic temperature extended southward to the Pyrenees and the Alps. Glaciers formed under the influence of perpetual frost and snow descended into the valleys and plains over the greater portion of Central Europe and Northern Asia, and an Arctic winter reigned throughout.

This condition of things, pertaining to what is known as the glacial period, was unquestionably of long duration. But after some partial variations of temperature, and a consequent advance and retrocession of the glacial influences along what was then the border lines of a north temperate zone, the first period of extreme cold drew to a close. Between the Alps and the mountain ranges of Scotland and Wales, the winter resembled that which even now prevails on the North American continent, in latitudes in which the moose, the wapiti, and the grizzly bear, freely range over the same areas where during a brief summer of intense heat enormous herds of buffalo annually migrate from the south. A similar alternation of seasons within the European glacial period can alone account for the presence, alongside of an Arctic fauna, of animals such as the hippopotamus and the hyæna, known only throughout the historical period as natives of the tropics. The range of temperature of Canadian seasons admits of the Arctic skua-gull, the snow-goose, the Lapland bunting, and the like Arctic visitors, meeting the king-bird, the humming-bird, and other wanderers from the gulf of Mexico.

Such conditions of climate may account for the recovery of the remains of the reindeer and the hippopotamus in the same drift and cave-deposits of Europe’s glacial period. The woolly mammoth and rhinoceros, the musk-ox, reindeer, and other Arctic fauna, may be presumed to have annually retreated from the summer heats, and given place to those animals, the living representatives of which are now found only in tropical Africa. A period of depression followed, during which, throughout an extensive area, all but the highest levels was submerged beneath an Arctic ocean, and the drift and boulders of the highlands of Norway and Scotland were dispersed by means of icebergs over the low levels of what was then an archipelago, in which only the higher peaks of Britain rose out of the sea. Far to the south of the Thames and the Seine, the drift of this Arctic ocean was then accumulating the evidence which now reveals to us the fauna and the arts of quaternary Europe; just as the overlying boulders of the American drift far south in the Ohio valleys show their derivation from the Laurentian mountains of Canada. With the elevation of the old ocean-bed there appears to have been a renewal of an Arctic temperature indicated by the traces of local glaciers in the mountains of Scotland, Cumberland, and Wales; and so the glacial period drew to a close. A gradual rise of temperature carried the lines of ice and perpetual snow further and further northward, excepting in regions of great elevation, as in the Swiss Alps. This was necessarily accompanied with the melting of the glaciers accumulated in the mountain valleys throughout the protracted period of cold. The broken rocks and soil of the highlands were swept into the valleys by torrents of melted ice and snow; the lower valleys were hollowed out and reformed under this novel agency; and the landscape assumed its latest contour of valley, estuary, and river-beds.

This is what the elder geologists, including Dean Buckland, accepted for a time as the evidence of the Mosaic deluge. It is now universally recognised as the product of no sudden cataclysm, but the result of operations carried on continuously throughout periods of vast duration, during which the memorials of animal and vegetable life of the pleiocene and pleistocene epochs were slowly imbedded in the accumulated débris of this diluvian reconstruction. The characteristics of the fossil mammals of the post-glacial period differ in many respects so widely from all that we are accustomed to associate with the presence of man, that they help to suggest even an exaggerated idea of antiquity. Nevertheless, there is no break of continuity. Animals still living have their fossil representatives alongside of the pleiocene mastodon, cave-lion, and bear: if indeed the latter be not itself the ursus ferox, or grizzly bear of North America, the claws of which are still worn as the proudest trophy of the Red Indian hunter.

Of twenty-one species of post-glacial mammals identified in the deposits of Brixham Cavern, only four are regarded as extinct species, and these include the ursus spelæus and hyæna spelæa. But their habitats have been widely changed in the climatic and geographical revolutions which have intervened. Some have to be sought for within the Arctic circle; others in low latitudes, and on continents lying wholly outside of that world which was alone known to Aristotle and Pliny. Every thing indicates a revolution slowly wrought through unnumbered ages, during which the ancient fauna was being supplanted by novel species, including those which belong to the historical period of temperate Europe. So far as appears from present evidence, man himself has to be included among the new additions to the European fauna. To this post-glacial period must, at any rate, be assigned the advent of the Flint-Folk of the Drift: a race of hunters and fishers not greatly differing in their rude arts from the more immediate precursors of the Historic races in Europe’s Stone Age; but who were contemporaneous with the Siberian mammoth and other extinct elephants, the woolly rhinoceros, the musk-ox, and the reindeer of France; and with numerous extinct carnivora of proportions corresponding to the gigantic herbivora on which they preyed.

The regions in which remains of the Flint-Folk have hitherto chiefly occurred embrace the valleys of Northern France and Southern England, where now the vine and the hop clothe the sunny slopes with their luxuriance. But as fresh evidence accumulates, corresponding indications are found to extend to the shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Traces of Europe’s neolithic artificers have been found in the caves of Gibraltar; and among a singularly interesting accumulation of flint-flakes, polished stone axes, rude pottery, etc., lying beside the skeletons of their owners, in the same caves of Andalusia from one of which a golden tiara of primitive workmanship has been recovered.^[9] Among remoter traces in the Maccagnone, Sicilian cave, Dr. Falconer could discover nothing suggestive of a different period for the rude flint implements and the numerous bones of the hippopotamus, mammoth, cave-lion, and other fossil mammals with which they were conjoined; while far eastward, near Beyrout, the Rev. H. B. Tristram reports the occurrence, in the stalagmitic flooring of a limestone cave, of bones and teeth assigned to a fossil ox, the red-deer, and the reindeer, alongside of the flint-knives or flakes which the prehistoric cave-men of Lebanon had used when feasting on such prey.^[10] But though such traces occur on ancient historic sites, we search in vain for any connecting link between the oldest historic races and those belonging to an era which one distinguished geologist has designated as “The Second Elephantine Period”;^[11] when, according to his reconstruction of the physical geography of the region, the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine; the English Channel was not yet in being, and Britain existed only as part of a continent which stretched away uninterruptedly northward towards the Arctic circle.

It thus appears that the advent of man in Northern Europe is assignable to a period when the mammoth and the tichorine rhinoceros still roamed its forests, and the great cave-tiger and other extinct carnivora haunted its caverns; when the gigantic Irish elk, the reindeer, the musk-ox, and the wild horse were objects of the chase; and the hippopotamus major was a summer visitor to the Seine and the Thames. When first employing the term prehistoric which has since obtained such universal acceptance, I remarked, in reference to Scottish aboriginal traces: “There is one certain point in this inquiry into primitive arts which the British antiquary possesses over all others, and from whence he can start without fear of error. From our insular position it is unquestionable that the first colonist of the British Isles must have been able to construct some kind of boat, and have possessed sufficient knowledge of navigation to steer his course through the open sea.”^[12] It then seemed a postulate on which the most cautious adventurer into the great darkness which lies behind us might confidently take his stand. But the point was no certain one after all. The fauna of the later Elephantine period still roamed over a wide continent unbroken by the English Channel or the Irish Sea; and the valley of the Rhine stretching northward through the still unsubmerged plain of the German Ocean, received as tributaries the Thames and the Humber, perhaps also the Tweed and the Forth. Measured therefore by the most moderate estimate of geological chronology, the historical period is, in relation to the interval since the first appearance of man, somewhat in a ratio with the superficial soil and vegetable mould, as compared with the whole deposits of the stratified drift: in other words, it is so insignificant as, in a geological point of view, to be scarcely worth taking into account.

Whatever be the consequences involved in such comprehensive inductions, proofs appear to accumulate, with every renewed search, of the wide diffusion throughout the bone-bearing drift of the post-glacial period, of symmetrically-formed flints, bearing indubitable traces of intelligence and primitive mechanical skill.

It is the old argument of Paley, reproduced in a form undreamt of in his philosophy. “If,” he might have said, “in digging into a bank of gravel we find a flint, we do not pause to ask whence it came; but if our spade strike on a watch?”——In the age of the Flint-Folk mechanical ingenuity expended itself for other purposes than the manufacture of time-measurers; but if the artificial origin of the implements of the drift, and their consequent indications of the presence of man, be acknowledged, our greatest difficulty is the remoteness of the period which they seem to indicate. Worked flints and other assumed human industrial remains have now been recovered from caverns, in various countries of Europe, as in the caves of Engis and Chokier, near Liége; at Mont Salève, Geneva; in the south of France, in Belgium, and in England: in every case so mingled with remains of the mammoth, rhinoceros, hyæna, and other extinct mammals, as to lead to the conviction of their contemporaneous deposition. Recent carefully conducted explorations in the Devonshire caves have resulted in seemingly indisputable proof that English flint-implements of the Amiens type are coeval with the extinct fauna; and that consequently the presence of their manufacturers must be assigned to periods prior to the successive inundations and depositions by which Brixham cave was gradually filled with layers of water-worn gravel, silt, or cave-earth, bone breccia, and solid floorings of carbonate of lime.

The rudeness of many of the worked flints has suggested the idea of their accidental origin; but the most diligent search in the heaps of chalk-flints broken for the roads, in France or England, or crushed in situ by subterranean movements, as in the Isle of Wight, has failed to recover a single specimen resembling even the rudest implements of the drift; whereas, in the ancient flint pits of the Shawnees, and probably of the Mound-Builders of Ohio,—to which I shall again refer,—I have collected fractured flints of precisely the same types as those familiar to us among the rudest drift implements. They differ for the most part in size, and also in type, from those found in early British or Danish grave-mounds; but artificial origin and inventive design are as obvious in the one as in the other.

That forgery of drift implements has been practised latterly, especially by the French workmen, is indisputable, but this need not affect the question. The facts connected with their discovery had been on record for nearly a century and a half before their significance was perceived; and specimens lay unheeded in the British Museum and in the collection of the Society of Antiquaries of London, with their human workmanship undisputed, so long as their origin was ascribed to Celtic art.^[13] In reality the explorers of the drift have been perplexed by the very abundance of the traces of art which it discloses. Dr. Rigollot states that in the pits of St. Acheul alone, between August and December 1854, upwards of four hundred specimens were obtained. The lowest estimate of the number recovered in the valley of the Somme is 3000; but this is exclusive of the more dubious flint-flakes, styled knives, estimated by Sir Charles Lyell at many thousands more.^[14] In England flint implements of the same peculiar type have already rewarded research in many localities; so that Mr. Evans justly remarks: “The number found is almost beyond belief.”^[15] Some reasons tending to account for their accumulation in such localities are discussed in the following chapter, in the light of analogous discoveries in the New World. But while it is no longer possible to question their artificial origin, and the consequent evidence of the presence of man in those localities where they abound, the haunts of those primeval hunters and fishers were the river-valleys of an elder world; and any attempt at estimating the time required for changes of climate, extinction of fauna, the succession of races implied in the phases of palæolithic and neolithic arts, and the gradual introduction and development of metallurgy, involves so many unknown quantities, that at present it must suffice to recognise as no longer disputable that the whole historic period of Northern Europe is insignificant when compared with the time requisite to account for all the phenomena in question. The relative chronology of the French drift is: 1st, superficially, tombs and other remains of the Roman period, scarcely perceptibly affected in their geological relations by nearly the whole interval of the Christian era; 2d, in the alluvium, seemingly imbedded by natural accumulation, at an average depth of 15 feet, remains of a European stone-period, corresponding to those of the recently discovered pfahlbauten, or lacustrine villages of the Swiss Lakes; and, 3d, the tool-bearing gravel, imbedding works of the Flint-Folk, wrought seemingly when the rivers were but beginning the work of excavating the valleys which give their present contour to the landscapes of France and England.

With such indications of the remoteness of the era of the Drift-Folk it scarcely calls for special notice, that their tools correspond to some of those found in cave-deposits, as in Kent’s Hole, Devonshire; but that they are readily distinguishable from the smaller implements and weapons of the same material wrought by the primitive Barrow-Builders of Europe, or by modern savage tribes still ignorant of metallurgy. From whatever point we attempt to view the facts thus presented to our consideration, it becomes equally obvious that we are dealing with the traces of a period irreconcilable with any received system of historic chronology; but within which, nevertheless, we are compelled to recognise many indications of the presence of man.

By evidence of a like character, the intermediate but still remote periods of prehistoric centuries are peopled with successive races of men. Proofs of oscillation, upheaval, and derangement of the course of ancient rivers, had furnished indications of the enormous lapse of time embraced within the British stone-period before the discoveries of Abbeville and Amiens were heard of.^[16] In the year 1819 there was disclosed in the alluvium of the carse-land, where the river Forth winds its circuitous course through ancient historic scenes, the skeleton of a gigantic whale, with a perforated lance or harpoon of deer’s-horn beside it. They lay together near the base of Dunmyat, one of the Ochil Hills, twenty feet above the highest tide of the neighbouring estuary. Over this an accumulation of five feet of alluvial soil was covered with a thin bed of moss. The locality was examined by scientific observers peculiarly competent to the task; and at the same time sufficient traces of the old Roman causeway were observed, leading to one of the fords of the Forth, to prove that no important change had taken place on the bed of the river, or the general features of the strath, during the era of authentic history.^[17] Nor was this example a solitary one. Remains of gigantic Balænæ have been repeatedly found; and one skeleton discovered in 1824, seven miles further inland, was deposited in the Museum of Edinburgh University, along with the primitive harpoon of deer’s-horn found beside it, which in this instance retained some portion of the wooden shaft by which it had been wielded. Among antique spoils recovered at various depths in the same carse-land, the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries includes a primitive quern, or hand-mill, fashioned from the section of an oak,—such as is still in use by the Indians of America for pounding their grain,—and a wooden wheel of ingenious construction, found with several flint arrow-heads alongside of it.

With such well-authenticated and altogether indisputable evidence already in our possession, the additions made to our grounds for belief in the antiquity of the prehistoric dawn of Britain or Europe do not materially affect the conclusions thereby involved, though they add to the apparent duration of the human era. Whatever difficulties may seem to arise from the discoveries at Abbeville and Amiens, or the older ones at Gray’s Inn Lane, Hoxne, and elsewhere, in relation to the age of man, the chronology which suffices to embrace the ancient Caledonian whaler within the period of human history will equally adapt itself to more recent disclosures. And lying, as the Scottish relics did, almost beneath the paving of the Roman causeway, they suffice to show that discoveries relative to the British Celt of Julius Cæsar’s time, or to the Romanised Briton of Claudius or Nero, which have hitherto seemed to the antiquary to illuminate the primeval dawn, bear somewhat less relation to the period to which the Dunmyat and Blair-Drummond Moss harpoons belong, than the American aborigines of the fifteenth century do to primeval generations of the New World. The very question raised anew by such disclosures as the British drift, ossiferous caves, grave-mounds, and chance deposits reveal, is whether the ancient Celt, on whom Roman and Saxon intruded, was not himself a very recent intruder on older allophylian occupants?^[18] If he was not, we are left to imagine for his race an antiquity and a history, compared with which the dreams of Merlin and the fables of Geoffrey of Monmouth are credible things.

With the advent of man antedated in geological eras, the Roman period becomes, in truth, a part of very modern history; and the vast ages computed to have intervened between the two periods baffle the fancy in its efforts to comprehend the links by which they are connected. But crude as are the arts of that primeval age, it will be seen that they compare favourably with those of uncultured man at any later period. Recent explorations, and especially those of the Dordogne caves of Central France, disclose carvings in bone, and engravings on ivory and slate, hereafter referred to, revealing an imitative skill, and powers of observation in the delineation of characteristic details of form and action, such as have rarely, if ever, been equalled in the art of modern uncultured races. If by the aid of those singularly interesting disclosures, we do indeed recover traces of the Flint-Folk belonging to an era estimated by some scientific chronologists as antedating our own by hundreds of thousands of years, it is of no slight importance to perceive that the interval which has wrought such revolutions on the earth as are recorded in the mammaliferous drift, show man the same reasoning, tentative, and inventive mechanician, as clearly distinguished then from the highest orders of contemporary life of the Elephantine or cave periods, as he is now from the most intelligent of the brute creation. In truth, so far from arriving by such disclosures any nearer an anthropoid link between man and the brute, the oldest art-traces of the palæotechnic men of Central France not only surpass those of many savage races, but they indicate an intellectual aptitude in no degree inferior to the average Frenchman of the nineteenth century.

Much of the reasoning relative to the characteristics which archæological discoveries assign to man in his primeval stage originates in an illogical association of the concomitants of modern intellectual and social progress with the indispensable requisites implied in man’s primary condition as a rational being. It is not necessary for the confirmation of a primeval Stone or Flint Period, that we degrade man from that majestic genesis of our race, when he heard the voice of the Lord God amongst the trees of Paradise and was not afraid. Still less is it requisite that we make of him that “extinct species of anthropoid animal” hastily invented by over-sensitive Mosaic geologists to meet the problematic case of pleistocene products of art. In that primeval transition of the ethnologist in which geology draws to a close, and archæology has its beginning, amid all the rudeness of palæolithic art, we may still recognise the rational lord of creation, the being endowed, not with physical but moral supremacy; in whom intelligence and accumulated experience were to prove more than a match for all the brute force of those gigantic mammalia so familiar to us now in fossil disclosures of the drift-gravels and cave-earth. Even if no more is claimed for primeval man than a condition akin to that of many modern uncivilised races, we can still discern the new and higher order of beings for which all others were to make way.

But if our modern technological standards are to be the only received tests of intellectual nobility, “his fair large front and eye sublime,” with all the suggestive picturings of Milton’s primeval man, are vain. His arts, though ample enough for all his wants, if tested by such standards, declare him no better than “the ignoble creature that arrow-heads and flint-knives would indicate.” He needed no weapons for war or the chase; implements of husbandry were scarcely less superfluous, amid a profusion ampler than the luxuriant plenty of the islands of the Southern Ocean. The needle and the loom were as foreign to his requirements as the printing-press or the electric telegraph. What use had he for the potter’s wheel, or the sculptor’s chisel, or the mason’s tools? And if his simple wants did suggest the need of some cutting implement, the flint-knife, or

“Such other gardening tools as art, yet rude,

Guiltless of fire, had formed,”

harmonise with the simplicity of that primeval life, and its easy toils, far more naturally than the most artistic Sheffield cutlery could do, with all its requisite preliminary processes of mining, smelting, forging, grinding, and hafting the needless tool.

The idea which associates man’s intellectual elevation with the accompaniments of mechanical skill, as though they stood somehow in the relation of cause and effect, and with the intellectual as the offspring, instead of the parent, of the mechanical element, is the product of modern thought. The very element which begets the unintellectual condition of the savage is that his whole energies are expended, and all his thoughts are absorbed, in providing daily food and clothing, and the requisite tools by which those are to be secured; or where, as in the luxuriant islands of Polynesia, nature seems to provide all things to his hand, his degraded moral nature unparadises the Eden of the bread-fruit tree.

A primeval “Stone period” appears to underlie the most remote traces of European civilisation; and not only to carry back the evidence of man’s presence to times greatly more remote than any hitherto conceived of, but to confirm the idea that his earliest condition was one not only devoid of metallurgy, but characterised by mechanical arts of the very simplest kind. But it does not necessarily follow that he was in a condition of intellectual dormancy. The degradation of his moral nature, and not the absence of the arts which we associate with modern luxury and enterprise, made him a savage. The Arab sheikh, wandering with his flocks over the desert, is not greatly in advance of the Indian of the American forests, either in mechanical skill or artistic refinement; yet the Idumean Job was just such a pastoral Arab, but, nevertheless, a philosopher and a poet, far above any who dwelt amid the wondrous developments of mechanical and artistic progress in the cities of the Tigris or the Euphrates. It is not to be inferred, however, that the whole history of the human race is affirmed by the archæologist to disclose a regular succession of periods—Stone, Bronze, and Iron, or however otherwise designated,—akin to the organic disclosures of geology; or that where their traces are found they necessarily imply such an order in their succession. The only true analogy between the geologist and the archæologist is, that both find their evidence imbedded in the earth’s superficial crust, and deduce the chronicles of an otherwise obliterated past by legitimate induction therefrom. The radical difference between the palæontologist and the ethnologist lies in this, that the one aims at recovering the history of unintelligent divisions of extinct life; the other investigates all that pertains to a still existing, intelligent being, capable of advancing from his own past condition, or returning to it, under the most diverse external circumstances.

Amid that strangely diversified series of organic beings which pertains to the studies of the geologist, there appears at length one, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals”;^[19] a being capable of high moral and intellectual elevation, fertile in design, and with a capacity for transmitting experience, and working out comprehensive plans by the combined labours of many successive generations. In all this there is no analogy to any of the inferior orders of being. The works of the ant and the beaver, the coral zoophyte and the bee, display singular ingenuity and powers of combination; and each feathered songster builds its nest with wondrous forethought, in nature’s appointed season. But the instincts of the inferior orders of creation are in vain compared with the devices of man, even in his savage state. Their most ingenious works cost them no intellectual effort to acquire the craft, and experience adds no improvements in all the continuous labours of the wonderful mechanicians. The beaver constructs a dam more perfect than the best achievements of human ingenuity in the formation of breakwaters, and builds for itself a hut which the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire justly contrasts in architectural skill with the ruder dwelling of the Asiatic Tartar. The bee, in forming its cell, solves a mathematical problem which has tasked the labours of acutest analysts. But each ingenious artificer is practising a craft which no master taught, and to which it has nothing to add. The wondrous, instinctive, living machine creates for itself the highest pleasure it is capable of in working out the art with which it is endowed; and accomplishes it with infallible accuracy, as all its untaught predecessors did, and as, without teaching, each new-born successor will do. To such architects and artists history does not pertain, for their arts knew no primeval condition of imperfection, and witness no progress. Of their works, as of their organic structure, one example is a sufficient type of the whole. The palæontologist’s materials have been designated by one popular geologist, “the Medals of Creation”; and the term, though borrowed from the antiquary, has a significance which peculiarly marks the contrast now referred to between geology and archæology. Like medals struck in the same die, the multitude of examples of an extinct species, each exquisitely modelled coral, and every cast of a symmetrical sigillaria, repeat the same typical characteristics; and the poet’s fancy may be accepted as literally true, in relation to the most ingenious arts which engage the study of the naturalist:—