Читать книгу Prehistoric Man: Researches into the Origin of Civilization in the Old and the New World - Daniel Wilson - Страница 4

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:—

“All the winged habitants of paradise,

Whose songs once mingled with the songs of angels,

Wove their first nests as curiously and well

As the wood minstrel in our evil day

After the labour of six thousand years.”^[20]

But with the relics of human art, even in its most primitive stage, it is otherwise. Each example possesses an individuality of its own, for it is the product of an intelligent will, capable of development, and profiting by experience.

Accumulated knowledge is the grand characteristic of man. Every age bequeaths some results of its experience; and this constitutes the vantage-ground of succeeding generations. The deterioration which follows in the wake of every impediment to such transmission and accumulation of knowledge no less essentially distinguishes man from the ingenious spinners, weavers, and builders, who require no lesson from the past, and bequeath no experience to the future. Man alone can be conceived of as an intelligent mechanician, starting with the first rudiments of art, devising tools, initiating knowledge, and accumulating experience. Whatever, therefore, tends to disclose glimpses of such a primitive condition, and of his earliest acquisitions in mechanical arts and metallurgic knowledge, helps to a just conception of primeval man. Let us then glance at the evidence we possess of such an initial stage of being. And first in seeming chronological order are those traces of human arts in the drift, or in ossiferous caves among the bones of strange orders of beings hitherto supposed to have long preceded the existence of man. In the ancient alluvial deposits—most modern among the strata of the geologist,—lie abundant traces of extinct animal life, belonging to that recent transitional era of the globe in which man first appears. In nearly all respects they present a contrast to everything we are familiar with in the history of our earth as the theatre of human action. In a zoological point of view they include man and the existing races of animals, as well as extinct races which appear to have been contemporaneous with indigenous species. To the archæologist they are rich in records of that primeval transition in which the beginnings of history lie. How early in that closing geological epoch man appeared, or how late into that archæological era the extinct fossil mammals survived, are the two independent propositions which the sister sciences have to establish and reconcile.

The insular character of Great Britain renders it a peculiarly interesting epitome of archæological study, a microcosm complete in itself, and little less ample in the variety of its records than the great continent, divorced from it by the ocean; yet the question, as we have seen, is reopened: Was it already insular when its earliest nomad trod its unhistoric soil? The Caledonian allophylian, as we now know, pursued the gigantic whale in an estuary which swept along the base of the far-inland Ochils; and guided his tiny canoe, above an ocean-bed, which had to be upheaved into the sunshine of many centuries before it could become the arena of deeds that live associated on the historic page with the names of Agricola, Edward, Wallace and Bruce, of Montrose, Cromwell, and Mar. Its history dawns in an era of geological mutation; yet not more so than is now at work in other and neighbouring historic lands. It is a type of the changes which were gradually transforming that strange post-tertiary microcosm into the familiar historic Britain of this nineteenth century.

From an examination of the detritus and included fossils, and the disclosures of peat-mosses, we learn that, when the British Isles were in possession of their first colonists, the country must have been almost entirely covered with forests, and overrun by animals long since extinct. In the deposits of marl that underlie the accumulated peat-bogs of Scotland and Ireland occur abundant remains of the fossil elk, an animal far exceeding in magnitude any existing species of deer. Its bones have been found associated with skeletons of the mammoth and other proboscidians, and with numerous teeth, jaws, and detached bones of the extinct rhinoceros, hippopotamus, hyæna, fossil ox, etc.; yet no doubt is now entertained that the elk was contemporaneous with man in the British Isles. Stone hatchets, flint arrow-heads, and fragments of pottery have been recovered alongside of its skeleton, under circumstances that satisfy geologists, as well as archæologists, of their contemporaneous deposition; its bones have been found with the tool-marks of the flint chisel and saw; and evidence of various kinds seems to exhibit this gigantic deer as an object of the chase, and a source of primitive food, clothing, and tools.

Professor Jamieson and Dr. Mantell note the discovery, in the county of Cork, of a human body exhumed from a marshy soil, beneath a peat-bog eleven feet thick. The soft parts were converted into adipocere, and the body, thus preserved, was enveloped in a deer-skin of such large dimensions, as to lead them to the opinion that it belonged to the extinct elk. In 1863, Professor Beete Jukes exhibited to the geological section of the British Association the left femur, with a portion of one of the tines of an antler, recently dug up in the vicinity of Edgeworthstown, lying in marl, under forty feet of bog. A transverse cut on the lower end of the femur corresponded with another on the antler, by which they appeared to have been adapted for junction. After carefully examining this bone, I entertain no doubt of its having been cut by a sharp tool, and purposely prepared as the haft of the horn blade which lay beside it. When the two were fastened together, they must have made a formidable weapon. Other bones of this fossil deer have been observed to bear marks of artificial cutting; but one of the most interesting evidences of their use was produced at a meeting of the Archæological Institute, June 3, 1864, when the Earl of Dunraven exhibited an imperfect Irish lyre, found in the moat of Desmond Castle, Adare, the material of which was pronounced by Professor Owen to be bone of the Irish elk. The improbability of the recovery of a musical instrument coeval with the Irish elk has been greatly lessened by more recent discoveries. Among the carved bone and graven ivory relics of the Troglodytes of the Dordogne valley was a reindeer bone pierced at one end by an oblique hole, reaching to the medullary canal. By blowing upon this, as on a hollow key, a shrill sound is produced; and to this instrument accordingly M. Paul Broca applies the name of the rallying whistle. But a later discovery furnishes more definite evidence of ancient musical art. In 1871 M. E. Piette explored the cavern of Gourdan (Haute-Garonne), and there in a layer of charcoal and cinders, intermingled with flint implements, he found what he describes as a neolithic flute. It also is formed of bone, but pierced with holes at the side: an undoubted example of the art of one of Jubal’s primitive disciples.

The evidence supplied by the ossiferous caves of England, as of the continents of Europe and America, is full of interest from corresponding revelations. Kirkdale Cave, Yorkshire, has acquired a special celebrity from the description and illustration of its contents, given by Dr. Buckland in his Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, in connection with a diluvial theory subsequently abandoned; and Kent’s Hole, Devonshire, one of the richest depositories of British fossil carnivora, yielded no less remarkable traces of primitive mechanical arts. Intermingled with remains of the rhinoceros, cave-hyæna, great cave-tiger, cave-bear, and other extinct mammalia in unusual abundance, lay not only worked flints and the like traces of human art, but also numerous implements wrought from their bones; and subsequent investigations of ossiferous caves in various localities, by competent scientific explorers, guided by the accumulated knowledge and experience of upwards of thirty years, have given precision to the ideas already entertained of the coexistence of man with the extinct fauna of the caves.

In those instances, as well as in similar disclosures in Belgium and Southern France, where the remains of man himself, as well as his handiwork, have been found associated with the fossil mammalia, the facts were for a time discredited, or explained away, as irreconcilable with long-accepted conclusions relative to the age and early condition of man. But in 1858 another ossiferous limestone cave was accidentally discovered at Brixham, in the vicinity of the famous Kent’s Hole, and negotiations were soon after entered into with a view to its thorough exploration for purposes of science. Unlike Kent’s Hole Cavern, after a succession of prolonged alternations of occupation by the carnivora of a late quaternary epoch; of submergence by local floods, with the deposition of their detrital accumulations in beds of varying character and contents; and the formation over all, at favourable points, of a flooring of carbonate of lime upwards of a foot thick: the falling in of a portion of the roof closed up the entrance of Brixham Cave, except to the smaller rodents and burrowing animals. Its history as the resort of the older mammalia, and of man himself, was thus abruptly closed, and it thenceforth remained intact, until its recent exploration. Thus, though in its indications of the presence of man, its evidence is meagre when compared with Kent’s Hole, it is wholly free from any confusing elements such as in that remarkable cavern manifestly pertain to Celtic, Roman, and even Saxon times.

Brixham Cave appears to have long been the resort of hyænas, who dragged their prey into its main passages, and left there the gnawed bones of the rhinoceros, the fossil horse and ox, the reindeer, roebuck, great red-deer, etc. It included unmistakable traces of the mammoth, or other huge proboscidian, was visited by the cave-tiger (Felis spelæa), and finally became a favourite haunt of the great cave-bear (Ursus spelæus), as well as of two other species of bears, one of which seems to correspond to the Ursus arctos, or brown bear, and another has been supposed to be identical with the Ursus ferox, or grizzly bear. From time to time it was also visited, and some of its remote recesses explored by man. Thirty-six flints in all have been recovered in the different strata of the cave beds. A few of those are simply unworked flints; but twenty-three of them betray traces of human workmanship and use; and include knives and oval and lanceolate blades, closely analogous to implements found in the Cavern of Aurignac, in the Pyrenees, and in that of Le Moustier, in the Dordogne. Others, though mere flint-flakes, bear decided marks of use as scraping tools. Another implement is a round pebble of siliceous sandstone, weighing 1 lb. 3 oz., which must have been brought from a distance, and shows on the side opposite to that by which it is most readily grasped by the hand distinct evidence of its use as a hammer stone. One, and only one, object wrought from animal substance, a small cylindrical pin, or rod of ivory, accompanied the more durable flints. Some of those indications of the presence of man were found in the bottom, or shingle-bed, overlaid by undisturbed cave-earth rich in mammalian remains; and the entire succession of beds was overlaid by a layer of stalagmite in which bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and other fossil mammals occurred.

It does not appear that Brixham Cave had at any time been inhabited by man. It has no accumulation of split bones or broken tools, nor any traces of the hearth, as in Kent’s Hole, or in the Caves of Dordogne and the Pyrenees. But the men of the mammoth period had resorted thither occasionally,—for hiding, it may be, or in pursuit of their prey; and thus dropped the worked flints which now reveal the evidence of their presence. There is no trace of human bones, or any indication that man fell a prey to the powerful wild animals which chiefly haunted the cave. But he explored its recesses, in one case at least, to a distance of seventy-four feet from the entrance; and unless we suppose him to have groped his way thither, when in search of a more effectual hiding-place from some human foe, it seems no unfair surmise that he carried with him the illuminating torch. The extinguished hearths of the French Caves, as at Aurignac and the Vezère, leave no room to question man’s early acquaintance with fire. Nor does it seem to me probable that, under the rigorous climate to which he was exposed in that remote post-glacial period, he could fail, as man, to employ the art of fire-making to alleviate his necessities, even as is now done under corresponding exigencies by the Arctic Esquimaux. Nevertheless it is to be noted that the flint implements found in Brixham Cave are of the rudest character; and like other specimens of the worked-flints of the men of the Drift or Cave periods, indicate a very slight development of constructive skill: unless, as hereafter shown from analogous American examples, there may be reason to regard many of them as merely in the first stage of manufacture into weapons or tools.

Kent’s Cavern yielded a greatly more varied illustration of primitive arts, such as barbed harpoon heads, bodkins, awls, and needles of bone. Like others found in the French Caves, they suggest comparison with the ingenious arts of the Esquimaux: and may also justify the inference that in milder regions, and under other favouring circumstances, contemporary man, then as now, manifested a higher intellectual vigour when free from the exhausting strain involved in the battle for life, either of the modern hyperborean, or of the post-glacial artificer of the cave period.

At an epoch which, though still prehistoric, is modern when compared with the latest traces of post-glacial or cave periods, the worked flints and implements of bone, found in many European primitive deposits, in caverns, chambered cairns, barrows, and among the chance disclosures of the agriculturist, continue to exhibit the most infantile stage of rudimentary art. Fragments of sun-baked urns, and rounded slabs of slate of a plate-like form, are associated with indications of rude culinary practices, illustrative of the habits and tastes of savage man. Broken pottery, calcined bones, charcoal ashes, and other traces of cooking operations, have been noted under similar circumstances, alike in England and on the continent of Europe; showing where the hearth of the Allophylian had stood. Along with those, in Kent’s cavern especially, the flints lay dispersed in all conditions, from the rounded mass as it came out of the chalk, through various stages of progress, on to finished arrow-heads and hatchets; while small flint-chips, and partially used flint-blocks, thickly scattered through the soil, served to indicate that the British troglodyte had there his workshop, as well as his kitchen, and wrought the raw material of that primitive stone-period into the requisite tools and weapons of the chase. Nor were indications wanting of the specific food of man in the remote era thus recalled for us. Besides accumulated bones, shells of the mussel, limpet, and oyster, lay heaped together near the mouth of the cave, along with a palate of the scarus: indicating that the aborigines found their precarious subsistence from the products of the chase and the spoils of the neighbouring sea.

The same fact is further illustrated by similar relics of a subterranean stone dwelling at Saverock, near Kirkwall, in Orkney, situated, like the natural caverns of Torbay, close to the sea-shore. Accumulated remains of charcoal and peat ashes lay intermingled with bones of the small northern sheep, the horse, ox, deer, and whale, and also with some rude implements illustrative of primitive Orcadian arts; while a layer of shells of the oyster, escallop, and periwinkle, the common whelk, the purpura, and the limpet, covered the floor and the adjacent ground, in some places half a foot deep.

In the interval since I first drew attention to such traces of Scotland’s prehistoric centuries, this class of remains has excited special interest. Ancient shell-mounds, analogous to the kjökkenmöddingr of Denmark, discovered on the coasts of Elgin and Inverness-shire, have yielded similar results; and the explorations of other mounds, especially that of Keiss, in Caithness, have proved beyond question that the natives of North Britain were familiar at a comparative late period with the Reindeer. Specimens of its horns have been found not only associated with flint implements, cups and personal ornaments of stone and shale, the miscellaneous heaps of fish-bones, littoral shells, and other débris of a kitchen-midden; but with the masonry of the Scottish Broch, or primitive round tower. Some of the reindeer horns thus found show marks of sawing and cutting, apparently with metal tools. How old they are may not be strictly determinable; but they serve to place the Scottish Reindeer Period in a very modern era, compared with that assigned to the “Reindeer Period” of France; and remove all grounds for rejecting the statement of Torfæus that, so recently as the twelfth century, the Jarls of Orkney were wont to cross the Pentland Firth, to chase the roe and the reindeer in the wilds of Caithness.

But recent discoveries replete with interest and value, which thus extend the resources of the European archæologist and anthropologist, are only known to me through the ordinary channels of information; and I turn therefore to another field of study and research, rendered valuable by the contrast which it presents in all ways to that of historic Europe, with its confusing elements pertaining to times when the ambition of Rome so overrode all nationalities, and obliterated the memories of history, that even now it is hard to persuade some men there was a European world before that of the Cæsars.

The city of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, is built on the drift clays which have accumulated above the rocks of the Lower Silurian formation to an average depth of upwards of thirty feet, and in some places to more than seventy feet. The same overlying beds of boulder clay and drift-gravel extend with monotonous uniformity eastward from Lake Huron to the Ottawa; and throughout the lower valley of the St. Lawrence to Labrador. The traces of ancient life recovered from those Canadian glacial deposits, with very few exceptions, correspond to living species,—including Radiata, Mollusca, Articulata, and Vertebrata, now found in other latitudes. As might be anticipated, the older glacial beds indicate a more Arctic condition of life; and thus accord with other evidence in pointing to a gradual amelioration of climate in Northern America. But it is only in the boulder clay of the lower St. Lawrence that the palæontologist finds the fossils by means of which such conclusions are formed; and alongside of which it would be reasonable to anticipate traces of the presence of man. The construction of an esplanade along the margin of the Bay of Toronto, during recent years, exposed a cutting of upwards of two miles in length, and laid bare the virgin soil of the most populous site now devoted to the civilising processes of European colonisation in Upper Canada. The same drift clay and gravel have been exposed in numerous other excavations, but hitherto without disclosures of interest to the archæologist. In two cases only, so far as I have been able to ascertain, did any trace of prior human presence appear. At the depth of nearly two feet from the surface, in front of the Parliament buildings, the bones and horn of a deer lay amid an accumulation of charcoal and wood ashes, and with them a rude stone chisel or hatchet. More recently, to the west of the same spot, at a depth of eight or nine feet, one of the cervical vertebræ of the Wapiti (Cervus Canadensis), was found along with a rude stone hatchet and a lance-head of flint. But the travelled fossils of the Toronto drift are of a very different era, and belong to the Hudson river group of the Lower Silurian, like the rocks on which it is superimposed. With varying organic remains imbedded in its clay and gravel, the same formation overlies the true fossiliferous rocks of Western Canada; and seems to make of its long stretch of wooded levels and gentle undulations a country fitted to slumber through untold centuries under the shadow of its forests, a type of the earth of primeval man, until the new-born mechanical science of Europe provided for it the railway and the locomotive, and made its vast chain of rivers and lakes a highway for the steamboat. With such novel facilities added to the indomitable energy of the intruding occupants, the whole face of the continent is in rapid process of transformation; and it is well, ere the change is completed, that some note be made of every decipherable index of the characteristics of a past thus destined to speedy obliteration.

From the uncleared wilds that still occupy the shores of Lake Superior, south-eastward through the great lakes and rivers to the valley of the St. Lawrence, those drift deposits reveal to the geologist marvellous changes that have transpired in this extensive area of the North American continent. Along the low shores stretching away from the rapids of Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Superior, huge granitic boulders lie strewed like the wreck of some Titanic Babel; raised beaches at various levels on the shores of Lakes Huron, Erie, and Ontario, show traces of other revolutions; and wherever the waves of the St. Lawrence reopen the deposits along the lower portion of the valley, the bottoms of an ancient ocean are revealed, frequently with littoral or deep-sea shells imbedded at different levels in the stratified drift. But remote as is the antiquity, according to all human chronology, to which the fauna of these beds of marine detritus belong, the palæontologist detects among their post-tertiary fossils the phoca, balænæ of more than one species, fishes, articulata, and the shells of many mollusca still inhabiting the neighbouring ocean along the northern Atlantic coasts. The period, therefore, which embraces those relics of ancient life is the same to which man belongs; and they mark for it one of the phases of that last transitional era during which the continent was being prepared for his entrance upon it. Since the natica, fusus, turritella, and other marine animals of the post-pleiocene period, were the living occupants of the St. Lawrence valley, vast changes have been wrought on the physical geography of the continent. The relative levels of the sea and land have altered, so as to elevate old sea-margins to the slopes of lofty hills, and leave many hundred miles inland escarpments wrought by the waves of that ancient sea. The conditions of climate have undergone no less important changes, developing in a corresponding degree the new character and conditions of life pertaining to this bed of an extinct ocean: covered with successive deposits of marine detritus, and then elevated into the region of sun and rain, to be clothed with the umbrageous forest, and to become the dwelling-place through another dimly-measured period of the wapiti, the beaver, and the bison; and with them, of the Iroquois, the Huron, and the Chippewa: all alike the fauna of conditions of life belonging to a transitional period of the New World preparatory to our own.

Marvellous as are those cosmical revolutions belonging to the period of emergence of the northern zone of America from the great Arctic Ocean, when we look on each completed whole the process appears to have been characterised by no abnormal violence. Slowly through long centuries the ocean shallowed. The deep-sea organisms of a former generation were overlaid by the littoral shells of a newer marine life, and then the tidal waves retreated from the emerging sea-beach; until now we seek far down in the gulf of the St. Lawrence and on the coast of Labrador for the living descendants of species gathered from the post-pleiocene drift. Thus the closing epoch of geology in the New World, as in the Old, is brought into contact with that in which its archæology begins; and we look upon the North American continent as at length prepared for the presence of man.

Such records are here noted among the disclosures of the great valley of the St. Lawrence, which drains well-nigh half a continent; for it is in the valleys by which the present drainage of historic areas takes place, that not only such deposits of recent shells and fossil relics of existing fauna occur, but also that the most extensive remains of the extinct mammalia are disclosed, in association with objects serving to link them with those of modern eras. In formations of this character have been found, in the lower valley of the Mississippi, the Elephas primigenius, the Mastodon Ohioticus, the Megalonyx, Megalodon, Ereptodon, and the Equus curvidens, or extinct American horse: with many other traces of an unfamiliar fauna, and also a flora, contemporaneous with those gigantic mammifers, but which also include both marine and terrestrial representatives of existing species. Corresponding in its great geographical outlines very nearly to its present condition, the American continent must have presented in nearly all other characteristics a striking contrast to its modern aspect, clothed though it seems to us in primeval forests, and scarcely modified by the presence of man. In the post-pleiocene formations of South Carolina, exposed along the bed of the Ashley River, remains of the megatherium, megalodon, and other gigantic extinct mammals occur, not only associated with existing species peculiar to the American continent, but also apparently with others, hitherto believed to have been domesticated and introduced for the first time by modern European colonists. But more interesting for our present purpose, as possibly indicating the contemporaneous existence of some of those strange mammals with man, are notices of remains of human art in the same formation. Professor Holmes, in exhibiting a collection of fossils from the post-pleiocene of South Carolina before the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, remarked: “Dr. Klipstein, who resides near Charleston, in digging a ditch for the purpose of reclaiming a large swamp, discovered and sent to me the tooth of a mastodon, with the request that I should go down and visit the place, as there were indications of the bones and teeth of the animal still remaining in the sands which underlie the peat-bed. Accordingly, with a small party of gentlemen, we visited the doctor, and succeeded not only in obtaining several other teeth and bones of this animal, but nearly one entire tusk, and immediately alongside of the tusk discovered the fragment of pottery which I hold in my hand, and which is similar to that manufactured at the present time by the American Indians.”^[21] It would not be wise to found hasty theories on such strange juxtaposition of relics, possibly of very widely separated periods. The Ashley River has channeled for itself a course through the eocene and post-pleiocene formations of South Carolina, and where these are exposed on its shores the fossils are washed from their beds, and become mingled with the remains of recent indigenous and domestic animals, and objects of human art. But the discovery of Dr. Klipstein was made in excavating an undisturbed and, geologically speaking, a comparatively recent formation. The tusk of the mastodon lay alongside of the fragment of pottery, in a deposit of the peat and sands of the post-pleiocene beds. Immediately underneath lie marine deposits, rich with varied groups of mollusca, corresponding to species now living on the sea-coast of Carolina, but also including two fossil species no longer to be met with there, though common in the Gulf of Mexico and the West Indian seas.

Here the palæontology of the New World discloses to us types of a fauna pertaining to its latest transitional period, which serve to illustrate the marvellous contrast between its commencement and its close. Until the discovery of teeth of the megatherium in the post-pleiocene bed of the Ashley River, remains of that extinct mammal had been found only in the state of Georgia, in North America, while the Mastodon Ohioticus and Elephas primigenius are among the well-known fauna of the Canadian drift. Of those, some North American localities have furnished remains in remarkable profusion, but none more so than the celebrated morass in Kentucky, known by its homely but expressive name of the Big-bone Lick. Imbedded in the blue clay of this ancient bog, entire skeletons, or detached bones, of not less than one hundred mastodons and twenty mammoths, have been found, besides remains of the megalonyx and other extinct quadrupeds. A magnificent skeleton of the Mastodon Ohioticus, now in the British Museum, was discovered, with teeth and bones of many others, near the banks of La Pomme de Terre, a tributary of the Osage River, Missouri; and there once more we seem to come upon contemporaneous traces of man. “The bones,” says Mantell, who examined them in the presence of Mr. Albert Koch, their discoverer, “were imbedded in a brown sandy deposit full of vegetable matter, with recognisable remains of the cypress, tropical cane, and swamp-moss, stems of the palmetto, etc., and this was covered by beds of blue clay and gravel to a thickness of about 15 feet. Mr. Koch states, and he personally assured me of the correctness of the statement, that an Indian flint arrow-head was found beneath the leg-bones of this skeleton, and four similar weapons were imbedded in the same stratum.”^[22] Some of the deductions of Mr. Koch were extravagant, and tended to bring discredit on his statement. But there appear to be no just grounds for doubting the main facts. A full-sized view of the large arrow-head is given in the Smithsonian Report of 1872. Another, but more dubious account, preserved in the American Journal of Science, describes the discovery in Missouri of the bones of a mammoth, with considerable portions of the skin, associated with stone spear-heads, axes, and knives, under circumstances which suggest the idea that it had been entangled in a bog, and there stoned to death and partially consumed by fire.^[23] Such contiguity of the works of man with those extinct mammals warns us at least to be on our guard against any supercilious rejection of indications of his ancient presence in the New World as well as in the Old.

Whether or not the mammoth and mastodon had been contemporary with man, their remains were objects of sufficiently striking magnitude to awaken the curiosity even of the unimpressible Indian; and traditions were common among the aborigines relative to their existence and destruction. M. Fabri, a French officer, informed Buffon that they ascribed those bones to an animal which they named the Père aux Bœufs. Among the Shawnees, and other southern tribes, the belief was current that the mastodon once occupied the continent along with a race of giants of corresponding proportions, and that both perished together by the thunderbolts of the Great Spirit. Another Indian tradition of Virginia told that these monstrous quadrupeds had assembled together, and were destroying the herds of deer and bisons, with the other animals created by the Great Spirit for the use of his red children, when he slew them all with his thunderbolts, excepting the big bull, who defiantly presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they fell; until, being at length wounded, he fled to the region of the great lakes, where he is to this day.

The first notice in an English scientific journal of the fossil mammals of the American drift furnishes such a counterpart to the Shawnee traditions of extinct giants as might teach a lesson to modern speculators in science; when it is borne in remembrance that the difficulty now is to reconcile with preconceived beliefs the discovery of works of human art alongside of their remains. In 1712, certain gigantic bones, which would now most probably be referred to the mastodon, were found near Cluverack, in New England. The famous Dr. Increase Mather soon after communicated the discovery to the Royal Society of London; and an abstract in the Philosophical Transactions duly set forth his opinion of this supposed confirmation of the existence of men of prodigious stature in the antediluvian world, as proved by the bones and teeth, which he judged to be human, “particularly a tooth, which was a very large grinder, weighing four pounds and three-quarters, with a thigh bone seventeen feet long.”^[24] They were doubtless looked upon with no little satisfaction by Dr. Mather, as a striking confirmation of the Mosaic record, that “there were giants in those days.” To have doubted the New England philosopher’s conclusions might have been even more dangerous then than to believe them now. Possibly, after the lapse of another century and a half, some of our own confused minglings of religious questions with scientific investigations will not seem less foolish than the antediluvian giants of the New England divine.

In all that relates to the history of man in the New World, we have ever to reserve ourselves for further truths. There are languages of living tribes, of which we have neither vocabulary nor grammar. There are nations of whose physical aspect we scarcely know anything; and areas where it is a moot point even now, whether the ancient civilisation of central America may not be still a living thing. The ossiferous caves of England have only revealed their wonders during the present century, and the works of art in the French drift lay concealed till our own day. We cannot, therefore, even guess what America’s disclosures will be. Discoveries in its ossiferous caverns have already pointed to the same conclusions as those of Europe. A cabinet of the British Museum is filled with fossil bones of mammalia, obtained by Dr. Lund and M. Claussen from limestone caverns in the Brazils, closely resembling the ossiferous caves of Europe. The relics were imbedded in a reddish-coloured loam, covered over with a thick stalagmitic flooring; and along with them lay numerous bones of genera still inhabiting the continent, with shells of the large bulimus, a common terrestrial mollusc of South America.

No clear line of demarcation can be traced here between the era of the extinct carnivora and edentata, and those of existing species; and there is therefore no greater cause of wonder than in the analogous examples of Europe, to learn that in the same detritus of those Brazilian caves Dr. Lund found human skeletons, which he believed to be coeval with some of the extinct mammalia. Nor have the first disclosures of works of art in the American drift still to be made. I have in my possession an imperfect flint-knife (Fig. 1), to all appearance as unquestionable a relic of human art as the most symmetrical of those assigned to a similar origin by the explorers of the French and English drift-gravels. It was given to me by Mr. P. A. Scott, an intelligent Canadian, who found it at a depth of upwards of fourteen feet, among the rolled gravel and gold-bearing quartz of the Grinell Leads, in Kansas Territory, while engaged in digging for gold. In an alluvial bottom, in the Blue Range of the Rocky Mountains, distant several hundred feet from a small stream called Clear Creek, a shaft was sunk, passing through four feet of rich black soil, and below this, through upwards of ten feet of gravel, reddish clay, and rounded quartz. Here the flint implement was found, and its unmistakably artificial origin so impressed the finder, that he secured it, and carefully noted the depth at which it lay.

Fig. 1.—Flint-Knife, Grinell Leads.

It is difficult at present to test such chance evidence accurately. The discovery of the palæolithic implements of Europe had been recorded upwards of half a century before their true significance was recognised; whereas the American explorer is on the look-out for similar disclosures, and evinces at times a feeling as though the honour of his country is imperilled if he fail. It will be seen, moreover, from the narrative of a subsequent chapter, that the abundance of flint and stone implements in the virgin soil of the New World is almost marvellous. The discovery, therefore, of stray specimens in modern river-gravels, the washings of gold-drift, or in any excavations liable to be affected by surface admixtures, must be viewed with the utmost caution. Several flint implements from the auriferous gravel of California were produced at the Paris Exposition of 1855. According to the geological survey of Illinois, for 1866, the bones of the mastodon and other fossil mammals have been found in a bed of “local drift” near Alton, underlying the Loess; and at the same depth stone axes and flint spear-heads were obtained.^[25]

But such disclosures of worked flints or polished implements of stone are cast into the shade by the reputed discovery of human remains in the auriferous drift of California. In 1857 Dr. C. F. Winslow produced a fragment of a human skull found eighteen feet below the surface, in the “pay drift,” at Table Mountain, in connection with the bones of the mastodon and fossil elephant. A later disclosure brought to light a complete human skull, reported to have been discovered in auriferous gravel, underlying five successive lava formations. Professor Whitney, after satisfying himself of the genuineness of the discovery, produced the skull at the Chicago meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1869, to the manifest delight of some who were prepared at once to relegate American man to a remoter epoch than the Flint-folk of the Abbeville and Amiens gravel drift. More recently a highly polished plummet of syenite, in the form of a double cone perforated at one end, was produced before the Chicago Academy of Sciences, as an implement found at a depth of thirty feet, in the drift-gravel of San Joaquin, California, by some workmen engaged in digging a well. In this case also Professor Whitney appears to have had no hesitation in assigning it to the age of the fossil elephant and mastodon. It does not seem to have been recognised how much more probable it is that a highly finished stone implement like the San Joaquin plummet should fall from the surface, in the process of excavation, and so be perhaps no older than the era of the Mexican conquest, than that it is a choice specimen of post-pleiocene art.

Much of the evidence hitherto adduced for the antiquity of the American man has a singularly modern aspect. The human skulls are of the predominant Indian type of the present day, though that need not surprise us. Dr. Usher only notes this in the case of the “human fossils” from the Brazil Caves, to add: “this consideration may spare science the trouble of any further speculation on the modus through which the New World became peopled from the Old; for after carrying backwards the existence of a people monumentally into the very night of time, when we find that they have also preserved the same type back to a remote, even to a geological, period, there can be no necessity for going abroad to seek their origin.”^[26] The question of this fancied American type will come under review hereafter. But on a par with this evidence are fragments of baskets and clay vessels submitted to the New Orleans Academy of Sciences in 1867, as contemporary with the elephant and other fossil mammals, the bones of which were found in digging the same salt-pits in which the pottery and basket-work were met with; or a fragment of cane-matting presented to the Smithsonian Institution in 1866 by Mr. J. F. Cleu, along with portions of tusks and teeth of the fossil elephant which lay above it, at a depth of thirteen feet in a Louisiana salt mine. Matting, or basket-work, of split cane is as common among the contents of southern Indian graves as fragments of pottery; and both may be reasonably suspected to carry with them evidence inconsistent with any geological antiquity.

Fig. 2.—Lewiston Flint Implement. (5/7).

Mr. Charles C. Jones notes a discovery of a more suggestive character, due also to the search for gold. In the state of Georgia the river Chattahoochee flows through an auriferous region of the Nacoochee valley. From time to time the gold-diggers have made extensive cuttings through the soil and underlying drift-gravel, down to the slate-rock upon which it rests. During one of these excavations, at a depth of some nine feet, intermingled with the gravel and boulders of the drift, three large flint implements were found, measuring between three and four inches in length, and “in material, manner of construction, and appearance so nearly resembling some of the rough so-called flint hatchets belonging to the drift-type that they might very readily be mistaken the one for the others.”^[27] With those may not unfitly be classed a large implement of hornstone, now in the collection of the Scottish Antiquaries, obtained by me from a dealer in Indian curiosities at Lewiston in the State of New York, where it was said to have been found at a great depth when sinking a well. Its form, though common enough among the implements of the American Mound-Builders, rarely, if ever, occurs on so large a scale in Europe, except among palæolithic remains. Ovoid discs of the same class attracted the attention of the Rev. J. MacEnery in his early explorations of Kent’s Cavern, and have anew been brought to light in the recent systematic researches there. Mr. Evans figures one found there in 1866 (Fig. 3), somewhat smaller, and more ovoid in outline, but of the same type. The Lewiston implement is shown in Fig. 2. It has been reduced to the present shape by comparatively few strokes; and on the reverse side it appears as if broken off by a final ill-directed blow. One edge is worn and fractured as if by frequent use. Unfortunately more minute information of the locality and the circumstances attendant on its discovery could not be obtained. But even if it be regarded as only a stray relic of the same class as those hereafter described among the ancient mound deposits of Wisconsin and Ohio, it possesses a novel interest from its discovery near the banks of the Niagara River, where no traces of the Mound-Builders or their arts occur. Mr. Evans permits me to introduce here the analogous example from Kent’s Cavern. It is of grey cherty flint, and chipped on both faces with more than wonted care. Though smaller than the Lewiston implement, the difference is only about half an inch; the larger of the two being a little over five inches long. I have purposely engraved the Lewiston disc on a large scale, in order to suggest more clearly the proportions of this class of implements; and to show the close analogy traceable between those of the American continent, and the European disclosures of the river and cave drift.

Fig. 3.—Flint Disc, Kent’s Cavern. (½).

Such, then, are some of the indications which have been assumed to point to the ancient presence of man in the New World. If we estimate this by historical, and not by geological periods, whatever proofs of his antiquity archæology may supply will be found to accord with other evidence; and especially with proofs furnished by the multitude of independent languages, and the diversity of types of race, ranging from the Arctic circle to Tierra del Fuego. But it would be rash to assume from the partial evidence yet obtained, that the juxtaposition of flint arrow-heads with the mastodon of Missouri, the pottery with bones and tusk of the same animal in the post-pleiocene of South Carolina, the human bones in the rich ossiferous caverns of the Brazils, or the flint implements, and human remains recovered from Californian and other auriferous drifts, unquestionably prove the existence of man on the American continent contemporaneously with the fossil elephant or the mastodon.

The proofs hitherto adduced have been at best only suggestive of further research. There is no question that Dr. Lund visited that portion of Brazil lying between the Rio das Velhas and the Rio Paraopeba, with very important palæontological results. He there found a mountain chain of limestone rock, abounding with fissures and caverns; and from some of these calcareous caves he recovered, not only the bones of numerous fossil mammals imbedded in red earth, but also human bones which he pronounced to be fossil. The remains included not only those of sloths and armadillos of gigantic size, but also extinct genera of monkeys, all assumed to have been contemporaries of the fossil cave-men. But experience is teaching the palæontologist that the mere recovery of bones or implements from the same cave is no proof of contemporaneity. A cave which had been filled with cave-earth and bone breccia, together with extinct animals of the period of the glyptodon and the mylodon, may in a long subsequent era have become the shelter or the place of sepulture of Indians.

Nearly forty years have elapsed since Dr. Lund’s discovery. Since then the lamented Agassiz has visited Brazil with valuable results to science; but no additional light has been thrown on the significance of the disclosures of this interesting locality. One important fact, however, has not only been admitted, but insisted upon. The crania of the fossil men of Brazil betray no traces of approximation to that of the fossil monkey, but on the contrary differ in no respect from the predominant American Indian type; and the same has since been affirmed of a set of human skulls now in the Smithsonian collection, which were found incrusted with stalagmite, in a limestone cave in Calaveras County, California. Their fossil character and extreme antiquity were at first assumed to be indisputable. In this other respect they correspond with the Brazilian fossil remains. Professor Jeffreys Wyman reported of them that they present “no peculiarities by which they could be distinguished from other crania of California.”^[28]

Here then might seem to be additional proofs “that the general type of races inhabiting America at that inconceivably remote era was the same which prevailed at the period of the Columbian discovery”;^[29] and that, therefore, Dr. Morton’s assumed uniform cranial type pertains to the American man from remotest geological time. There seems more reason, however, for believing that the Calaveras Cave was a place of interment of the present race of Indians; and that its crania are very modern compared even with the fossil Caribs of Guadaloupe. But the increasing evidence of the remote antiquity of the European man has naturally suggested a revision of the evidence adduced in confirmation of his ancient presence in the New World.

Sir Charles Lyell latterly regarded with greater favour than he had once done, the possible coexistence of man with the mastodon, megalonyx, and other extinct species, among bones of which, in the loam of the Mississippi valley, near Natchez, a human pelvic bone was recovered, and made the basis of very comprehensive theories. In the delta of the same river, near New Orleans, a complete human skeleton is reported to have been found, buried at a depth of sixteen feet, under the remains of four successive cypress forests; and this discovery furnished the data from which Dr. Bennet Dowler has assigned to the human race an existence in the delta of the Mississippi 57,000 years ago.^[30]

Evidence of this exceptional nature requires to be used with modest caution. Antiquaries of Europe having found tobacco pipes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries alongside of pottery and other undoubted remains of Roman art, have hastily antedated the use of tobacco to classic times.^[31] On equally good evidence it might be carried back to those of the mammoth, as the discovery of a similar relic has been recorded at a depth of many feet, in sinking a coal-pit at Misk, in Ayrshire.^[32]

[6]	The British Dominions in North America. Lond. 1832. Vol. i. p. 89.

[7]	Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher.

[8]	Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. i. p. 41.

[9]	Antiguedades Prehistoricas de Andalusia, Madrid, 1868.

[10]	The Land of Israel: a Journal of Travels in Palestine, 1865, p. 11.

[11]	J. Trimmer: Jour. Geol. Soc., vol. ix.

[12]	Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 1851, 1st Ed. p. 29.

[13]	Archæologia, vol. xiii. p. 206; vol. xxxviii. p. 301.

[14]	Antiquity of Man, 4th Ed. p. 190.

[15]	Archæologia, vol. xxxviii. p. 296.

[16]	Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, 1st Ed. p. 33.

[17]	Edin. Phil. Jour., i. 395.

[18]	This question was first brought forward by the author in an “Inquiry into the Evidence of the existence of Primitive Races in Scotland prior to the Celtæ.”—British Association Report, 1850.

[19]	Hamlet, Act ii. sc. 2.

[20]	Montgomery, Pelican Island.

[21]	Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, July 1859, pp. 178, 186.

[22]	Mantell’s Fossils of the British Museum, p. 473.

[23]	American Journ. of Science and Arts, vol. xxxvi. p. 199, First Series.

[24]	Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxiv. p. 85.

[25]	Geol. Survey of Illinois, by A. H. Worthen, vol. i. p. 38.

[26]	Types of Mankind, p. 351.

[27]	Antiquities of the Southern Indians, p. 293.

[28]	Smithsonian Report, 1867, p. 407.

[29]	Dr. Usher, Types of Mankind, p. 351.

[30]	Types of Mankind, p. 272.

[31]	La Normandie Souterraine, p. 76.

[32]	Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, vol. ii. p. 505.