PREHISTORIC MAN

KASKATACHYUH.
A CHIMPSEYAN CHIEF.
Drawn by D. Wilson LL.D. from sketches by Paul Kane.
Cooper & Hodson Lith. 188, Strand, London, W.C.

PREHISTORIC MAN

Researches into the Origin of Civilisation

in the Old and the New World.

BY

DANIEL WILSON, LL.D., F.R.S.E.

PROFESSOR OF HISTORY & ENGLISH LITERATURE IN UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, TORONTO;

AUTHOR OF THE ‘PREHISTORIC ANNALS OF SCOTLAND,’ ETC.

THIRD EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED,

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

London:

MACMILLAN AND CO.

1876.

[The right of translation is reserved.]

Edinburgh University Press:

THOMAS AND ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY.

IN FOND MEMORIAL

OF A BROTHER’S LIFE-LONG SYMPATHY

IN MANY FAVOURITE RESEARCHES

These Volumes

DEPRIVED BY DEATH OF THEIR PURPOSED DEDICATION

ARE INSCRIBED WITH THE LOVED NAME OF

GEORGE WILSON, M.D. F.R.S.E.

LATE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH

AND DIRECTOR OF THE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM OF SCOTLAND.

PREFACE.

The subject primarily treated of in the following pages is the man of that new hemisphere which was revealed to Europe in 1492. There through all historic centuries he had lived apart, absolutely uninfluenced by any reflex of the civilisation of the Ancient World; and yet, as it appears, pursuing a course in many respects strikingly analogous to that by means of which the civilisation of Europe originated. The recognition of this is not only of value as an aid to the realisation of the necessary conditions through which man passed in reaching the stage at which he is found at the dawn of history; but it seems to point to the significant conclusion that civilisation is the development of capacities inherent in man.

The term used in the title was first employed, in 1851, in my Prehistoric Annals of Scotland, where evidence was adduced in proof of man’s presence in Britain “long anterior to the earliest indications of the Aryan nations passing into Europe.” It was purposely coined to express the whole period disclosed to us by means of archæological evidence, as distinguished from what is known through written records; and in this sense the term was speedily adopted by the Archæologists of Europe. But the subject thus defined is a comprehensive one; and in its rapid growth, distinctive subdivisions have been introduced which tend to narrow the application of the term. Nevertheless it is still a legitimate definition of man, wherever his history is recoverable solely by means of primitive arts.

The first edition of Prehistoric Man, published in 1862, was followed in 1865 by another, carefully revised in accordance with later disclosures. Since then I have availed myself of further opportunities for study and research in reference both to existing races, and to the arts and monumental remains of extinct nations of the New World. Within the same period important additions have been contributed to our knowledge not only of the arts, but of the physical characteristics of primeval man in Europe. In the present edition, accordingly, much of the original work has been rewritten. Several chapters have been replaced by new matter. Others have been condensed, or recast, with considerable modifications and a new arrangement of the whole.

The illustrations have been correspondingly augmented; and some of them engraved anew from more accurate drawings. In the first edition they numbered seventy-one. They now amount to one hundred and thirty-four, including several for which I am indebted to the courtesy of Mr. John Evans, F.R.S., to the publishers of Nature, and to the Council of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

D. W.

University College, Toronto,

18th November 1875.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA—THE OLD WORLD AND THE NEW—AMERICAN PHASES OF LIFE—THE TERM PREHISTORIC—INFLUENCE OF MIGRATIONS—WHAT IS CIVILISATION?—DOMESTICATION—INDIAN PHILOSOPHY—ABORIGINES—THE TARTAR—THE ARAB—LANGUAGES OF AMERICA—WANDERINGS OF THE NATIONS—FOSSIL MAN—OCCUPATION OF THE NEW WORLD.

The recent development of archæology as a science is due in no slight degree to the simplicity which characterises the prehistoric disclosures of Scandinavia, Ireland, and other regions of Europe lying beyond the range of Greek and Roman influence. But the same element presents itself on a far more comprehensive scale alike in the archæology and the ethnology of the western hemisphere. America may be assumed with little hesitation to have begun its human period subsequent to that of the old world, and to have started later in the race of civilisation. At any rate it admits of no question that its most civilised nations had made a very partial advancement when, in the fifteenth century, they were abruptly brought into contact with the matured civilisation of Europe. Hence the earlier stages of human progress can be tested there freed from many obscuring elements inevitable from the intermingling of essentially diverse phases of civilisation on old historic areas. In the days of Herodotus, Transalpine Europe was a greater mystery to the nations on the shores of the Mediterranean than Central Africa is to us. To the Romans of four centuries later, Britain was still almost another world; and the great northern hive from whence the spoilers of the dismembered empire of the Cæsars were speedily to emerge, was so entirely unknown to them, that, as Dr. Arnold remarks, “The Roman colonies along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube looked out on the country beyond those rivers as we look up at the stars, and actually see with our eyes a world of which we know nothing.” Nevertheless, the civilisation of the historic centres around the Mediterranean was not without some influence on the germs of modern nations then nursing the hardihood of a vigorous infancy beyond the Danube and the Baltic. The shores of the Atlantic and German oceans, and the islands of the British seas, had long before yielded tribute to the Phœnician mariner; and as the archæologist and the ethnologist pursue their researches, and restore to light memorials of Europe’s early youth, they are startled with affinities to the ancient historic nations, in language, arts, and rites, no less than by the recovered traces of an unfamiliar past.

But it is altogether different with the New World which Columbus revealed. Superficial students of its monuments have indeed misinterpreted characteristics pertaining to the infantile instincts common to human thought, into fancied analogies with the arts of Egypt; and more than one ingenious philosopher has traced out affinities with the mythology and astronomical science of the ancient East; but the western continent still stands a world apart, with a peculiar people, and with languages, arts, and customs essentially its own. To whatever source the American nations may be traced, they had remained shut in for unnumbered centuries by ocean barriers from all the influences of the historic hemisphere. Yet there the first European explorers found man so little dissimilar to all with which they were already familiar, that the name of Indian originated in the belief, retained by the great cosmographer to the last, that the American continent was no new world, but only the eastern confines of Asia.

Such, then, is a continent where man may be studied under circumstances which seem to furnish the best guarantee of his independent development. No reflex light of Grecian or Roman civilisation has guided him on his way. The great sources of religious and moral suasion which have given form to medieval and modern Europe, and so largely influenced the polity and culture of Asia, and even of Africa, were effectually excluded; and however prolonged the period of occupation of the western hemisphere by its own American nations may have been, man is still seen there in a condition which seems to reproduce some of the most familiar phases ascribed to the infancy of the unhistoric world. The records of its childhood are not obscured, as in Europe, by later chroniclings; where, in every attempt to decipher the traces of an earlier history, we have to spell out a nearly obliterated palimpsest. Amid the simplicity of its palæography, the aphorism, by which alone the Roman could claim to be among the world’s ancient races acquires a new force: “antiquitas seculi, juventus mundi.”

The discovery of America was itself one of the great events in the most memorable era of the world’s progress. It wrought a marvellous change in the ideas and opinions of mankind relative to the planet they occupy, and prepared the way for many subsequent revolutions in thought, as well as in action. The world as the arena of human history was thenceforth divided into the Old and the New. In the one hemisphere tradition and myth reach backward towards a dawn of undefined antiquity; in the other, history has a definite and altogether modern beginning. Nevertheless no great research is needed to show that it also has been the theatre of human life, and of many revolutions of nations, through centuries reaching back towards an antiquity as vague as that which lies behind Europe’s historic dawn; and the study alike of the prehistoric and the unhistoric races of America is replete with promise of novel truths in reference to primeval man. Some of the oldest problems in relation to him find their solution there; and, amid the novel inquiries which now perplex the student of science, answers of unexpected value are rendered from the same source.

The study of man’s condition and progress in Europe’s prehistoric centuries reveals him as a savage hunter, armed solely with weapons of flint and bone, frequenting the lake and river margins of a continent clothed in primeval forests and haunted by enormous beasts of prey. Displaced by intrusive migrations, this rude pioneer disappears, and his traces are overlaid or erased by the improved arts of his supplanters. The infancy of the historic nations begins. Metallurgy, architecture, science, and letters follow, effacing the faint records of Europe’s nomadic pioneers; and the first traces of late intruders acquire so primitive an aspect, that the existence of older European nations than the Celtæ seemed till recently too extravagant an idea for serious consideration.

After devoting considerable research to the recovery of the traces of early arts in Britain, and realising from many primitive disclosures some clear conception of the barbarian of Europe’s prehistoric dawn, it has been my fortune to become a settler on the American continent, in the midst of scenes where the primeval forests and their savage occupants are in process of displacement by the arts and races of civilised Europe. Peculiarly favourable opportunities have helped to facilitate the study of this phase of the New World, thus seen in one of its great transitional eras: with its native tribes, and its European and African colonists in various stages of mutation, consequent on migration, intermixture, or collision. In observing the novel aspects of life resulting from such a condition of things, I have been impressed with the conviction that many of the ethnological phenomena of Europe’s prehistoric centuries are here reproduced on the grandest scale. Man is seen subject to influences similar to those which have affected him in all great migrations and collisions of diverse races. Here also is the savage in direct contact with civilisation, and exposed to the same causes by means of which the wild fauna disappear. Some difficult problems of ethnology have been simplified to my own mind; and opinions relative to Europe’s prehistoric races, based on inference or induction, have received striking confirmation. Encouraged by this experience, I venture to set forth the results of an inquiry into the essential characteristics of man, based chiefly on a comparison of the theoretical ethnology of primitive Europe, with such disclosures of the New World.

Man may be assumed to be prehistoric wherever his chroniclings of himself are undesigned, and his history is wholly recoverable by induction. The term has, strictly speaking, no chronological significance; but, in its relative application, corresponds to other archæological, in contradistinction to geological, periods. There are modern as well as ancient prehistoric races; and both are available for solving the problem of man’s true natural condition. But also the relation of man to external nature as the occupant of specific geographical areas, and subject to certain influences of climate, food, material appliances and conditions of life, involves conclusions of growing importance, in view of many novel questions to which the enlarged inquiry as to his true place in nature has given rise. If races of men are indigenous to specific areas, and controlled by the same laws which seem to regulate the geographical distribution of the animal kingdom, the results of their infringement of such laws have been subjected to the most comprehensive tests since the discovery of America. The horse transported to the New World roams in magnificent herds over the boundless pampas; and the hog, restored to a state of nature, has exchanged the degradation of the stye for the fierce courage of the wild boar. There also the indigenous man of the prairie and the forest can still be seen unaffected by native or intruded civilisation; while the most civilised races of Europe have been brought into contact with the African savage; and both have been subjected to all the novel influences in which the western continent contrasts no less strikingly with the temperate than with the tropical regions of the eastern hemisphere. The resultant changes have been great, and the scale on which they have been wrought out is so ample as to stamp whatever conclusions can be legitimately deduced from them with the highest interest and value.

The consequences following from changes of area and climate play a remarkable part in the history of man, and have no analogies in the migrations of the lower animals. The Frank, the Anglo-Saxon, and the Norman; the Hungarian, the Saracen, and the Turk: are all to a great extent products of the transplanting of seemingly indigenous races to more favouring localities; but the change to all of them was less than that to which the colonists of the New World have been subjected. There the old process was reversed; and the offspring of Europe’s highest civilisation, abruptly transferred to the virgin forest and steppes of the American wilderness, was left amid the widening inheritance of new clearings to develop whatever tendencies lay dormant in the artificial European man.

Here then are materials full of promise for the ethnical student:—the Red-Man, indigenous, seemingly aboriginal, and still in what it is customary to call a state of nature; the Negro, with many African attributes uneffaced, systematically precluded until very recent years from the free reception of the civilisation with which he has been brought in contact, but subjected nevertheless to novel influences of climate, food, and all external appliances; the White-Man also undergoing the transforming effects of climate, amid novel social and political institutions; and all three extreme types of variety or race testing, on a sufficiently comprehensive scale, their capacity for a fertile intermingling of blood. The period, moreover, is in some respects favourable for summing up results, as changes are at work which mark the close of a cycle in the novel conditions to which one at least of the intruded races has been subjected for upwards of three centuries.

In Europe we study man only as he has been moulded by a thousand external circumstances. The arts, born at the very dawn of history, give form to its modern social life. The faith and morals nurtured among the hills of Judah, the intellect of Greece, the jurisprudence and military prowess of Rome, and the civil and ecclesiastical institutions of medieval Christendom, have all helped to make of us what we are: till in the European of the nineteenth century it becomes a curious question how much pertains to the man, and how much to that civilisation, of which he is in part the author and in part the offspring? In vain we strive to detach European man from elements foreign to him, that we may look on him as he is or was by nature; for he only exists for us as the product of all those multifarious elements which have accumulated along the track of countless generations. The very serf of the Russian steppes cannot grow freely, as his nomad brother of Asia does; but must don the unfamiliar fashions of the Frank, as strange to him as the armour of Saul upon the youthful Ephrathite.

Is, then, civilisation natural to man; or is it only a habit or condition artificially superinduced, and as foreign to his nature as the bit and bridle to the horse, or the truck-cart to the wild ass of the desert? Such questions involve the whole ethnological problem reopened by Lamarck, Agassiz, Darwin, Huxley, and others. Whence is man? What are his antecedents? What—within the compass with which alone science deals,—are his future destinies? Does civilisation move only through limited cycles, repeating in new centuries the work of the old; attaining, under some varying phase, to the same maximum of our imperfect humanity, and then, like the wandering comet, returning from the splendour of its perihelion back to night?

Perhaps a question preliminary even to this is: What is civilisation? He who has seen the Euromerican and the Indian side by side can be at no loss as to the difference between civilised and uncivilised man. But is he therefore at liberty to conclude that the element which so markedly distinguishes the White- from the Red- man of the New World is an attribute peculiar to the former, rather than the development of innate powers common to both, and in the possession of which man differs from all other animals? Domestication is, for the lower animals, the subjection of them to artificial conditions foreign to their nature, which they could not originate for themselves, and which they neither mature nor perpetuate: but, on the contrary, hasten to throw off so soon as left to their own uncontrolled action. Civilisation is for man development. It is self-originated; it matures all the faculties natural to him, and is progressive and seemingly ineradicable. Of both postulates the social life alike of the forest and of the clearings of the New World seems to offer proofs; and to other questions involved in an inquiry into the origin of civilisation and man’s relations to it, answers may also be recovered from the same source. There the latest developments of human progress are abruptly brought face to face with the most unprogressive phases of savage nature; and many old problems are being solved anew under novel conditions. The race to which this is chiefly due had been isolated during centuries of preparatory training, and illustrates in some of the sources of its progress the impediments to the civilisation of savage races brought in contact with others at so dissimilar a stage. The very elements for Britain’s greatness seem to lie in her slow maturity; in her collision with successive races only a little in advance of herself; in her transition through all the stages from infancy to vigorous manhood. But that done, the Old Englander becomes the New Englander; starts from his matured vantage-ground on a fresh career, and displaces the American Red-man by the American White-Man, the free product of the great past and the great present.

It was with a strange and fascinating pleasure, that, after having striven to resuscitate the races of Britain’s prehistoric ages, by means of their buried arts,[^[1]] I found myself face to face with the aborigines of the New World. Much that had become familiar to me in fancy, as pertaining to a long obliterated past, was here the living present; while around me, in every stage of transition, lay the phases of savage and civilised life: the nature of the forest, the art of the city; the God-made country, the man-made town: each in the very process of change, extinction, and re-creation. Here, then, was a new field for the study of civilisation and all that it involves. The wild beast is in its native state, and hastens, when relieved from artificial constraints, to return to the forest wilds as to its natural condition. The forest-man—is he too in his natural condition? for Europe’s sons have, for upwards of three centuries, been levelling his forests, and planting their civilisation on the clearings, yet he accepts not their civilisation as a higher goal for him. He, at least, thinks that the white man and the red are of diverse natures; that the city and the cultivated field are for the one, but the wild forest and the free chase for the other. He does not envy the white man, he only wonders at him as a being of a different nature.

Broken-Arm, the Chief of the Crees, receiving the traveller Paul Kane and his party into his lodge, at their encampment in the valley of the Saskatchewan, told him the following tradition of the tribe. One of the Crees became a Christian. He was a very good man, and did what was right; and when he died he was taken up to the white man’s heaven, where everything was very beautiful. All were happy amongst their friends and relatives who had gone before them; but the Indian could not share their joy, for everything was strange to him. He met none of the spirits of his ancestors to welcome him: no hunting nor fishing, nor any of those occupations in which he was wont to delight. Then the Great Manitou called him, and asked him why he was joyless in His beautiful heaven; and the Indian replied that he sighed for the company of the spirits of his own people. So the Great Manitou told him that he could not send him to the Indian heaven, as he had, whilst on earth, chosen this one; but as he had been a very good man, he would send him back to earth again.

The Indian does not believe in the superiority of the white man. The difference between them is only such as he discerns between the social, constructive beaver, and the solitary, cunning fox. The Great Spirit implanted in each his peculiar faculties; why should the one covet the nature of the other? Hence one element of the unhopeful Indian future. The progress of the white man offers even less incentive to his ambition than the cunning of the fox, or the architectural instincts of the beaver. He, at least, does not overlook, in his sylvan philosophy, that feature in the physical history of mankind, which Agassiz complained of having been neglected: viz., the natural relations between different types of man and the animals and plants inhabiting the same regions. Yet the Indian of the American wilds is no more primeval than his forests. Beneath the roots of their oldest giants lie memorials of an older native civilisation; and the American ethnologist and naturalist, while satisfying themselves of the persistency of a common type, and of specific ethnical characteristics prevailing throughout all the widely-scattered tribes of the American continent,[^[2]] have been studying only the temporary supplanters of nations strange to us as the extinct life of older geological periods.

In that old East, to which science still turns when searching for the cradle-land of the human family, vast areas exist, the characteristics of which seem to stamp with unprogressive endurance the inheritors of the soil. Along the shores of the Indian Ocean and the Levant, and stretching from the Persian Gulf into the fertile valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris, are still found seats of civilisation coexistent with the earliest dawn of man’s history. But beyond these lies the elevated table-land of Central Asia, stretching away northward, and pouring its waters into inland seas, or directing their uncivilising courses into the frozen waters of the Arctic circle. Abrupt mountain-chains subdivide this elevated plateau into regions which have been for unrecorded ages the hives of pastoral tribes, unaffected by any intrusion of civilising arts or settled social habits; until, impelled by unknown causes, they have poured southward over the seats of primitive Asiatic civilisation, or westward into the younger continent of Europe.

From the wandering hordes of the great Asiatic steppes have come the Huns, the Magyars, and the Turks, as well as a considerable portion of the Bulgarians of modern Europe; while the sterile peninsula of Arabia has given birth to moral revolutions of the most enduring influence. Yet the capacity for civilisation of the Magyar or the Turk, transferred to new physical conditions, and subjected to higher moral and intellectual influences; or the wondrous intellectual vigour of the Arab of Bagdad or Cordova: affords no scale by which to gauge the immobility of the Tartar on his native steppe, or the Arab in his desert wilderness. Without agriculture or any idea of property in land, destitute of the very rudiments of architecture, knowing no written law, or any form of government save the patriarchal expansion to the tribe of the primitive family ties: we can discern no change in the wild nomad, though we trace him back for three thousand years. Migratory offshoots of the hordes of Central Asia, and of the wanderers of the Arabian desert, have gone forth to prove the capacity for progress of the least progressive races; but the great body tarries still in the wilderness and on the steppe, to prove what an enduring capacity man also has to live as one of the wild fauna of the waste.

The Indians of the New World, whencesoever they derived their origin, present to us just such a type of unprogressive life as the nomads of the Asiatic steppe. The Red-Man of the North-West exhibits no change from his precursors of the fifteenth century; and for aught that appears in him of a capacity for development, the forests of the American continent may have sheltered hunting and warring tribes of Indians, just as they have sheltered and pastured its wild herds of buffaloes, for countless centuries since the continent rose from its ocean-bed. That he is no recent intruder is indisputably proved alike by physical and intellectual evidence. On any theory of human origin, the blended gradations of America’s widely diversified indigenous races, demand a lengthened period for their development; and equally, on any theory of the origin of languages, must time be prolonged to admit of the multiplication of mutually unintelligible dialects and tongues in the New World. It is estimated that there are nearly six hundred languages, and dialects matured into independent tongues, in Europe. The known origin and growth of some of these may supply a standard whereby to gauge the time indicated by such a multiplication of tongues. But the languages of the American continents have been estimated to exceed twelve hundred and sixty, including agglutinate languages of peculiarly elaborate structure, and inflectional forms of complex development. Of the grammar of the Lenni-Lenapé Indians, Duponceau remarks: “It exhibits a language entirely the work of the children of nature, unaided by our arts and sciences, and, what is most remarkable, ignorant of the art of writing. Its forms are rich, regular, and methodical, closely following the analogy of the ideas which they are intended to express; compounded, but not confused; occasionally elliptical in their mode of expression, but not more so than the languages of Europe, and much less so than those of a large group of nations on the eastern coast of Asia. The terminations of their verbs, expressive of number, person, time, and other modifications of action and passion, while they are richer in their extension than those of the Latin and Greek, which we call emphatically the learned languages, appear to have been formed on a similar but enlarged model, without other aid than that which was afforded by nature operating upon the intellectual faculties of man.”[^[3]] At the same time it is no less important to note the limited range of vocabulary in many of the American languages. Those characteristics, taken along with their peculiar holophrastic power of inflecting complex word-sentences, and expressing by their means delicate shades of meaning, exhibit the phenomena of human speech in some of their most remarkable phases. But the range of the vocabularies furnishes a true gauge of the intellectual development of the Indian: incapable of abstract idealism, realising few generic relations, and multiplying words by comparisons and descriptive compounds.

To whatever cause we attribute such phenomena, much is gained by being able to study them apart from the complex derivative elements which trammel the study of European philology. Assuming for our present argument the unity of the human race, not in the ambiguous sense of a common typical structure, but literally, as descendants of one stock: in the primitive scattering of infant nations, the Mongol and the American went eastward, while the Indo-European began his still uncompleted wanderings towards the far west. The Mongol and the Indo-European have repeatedly met and mingled. They now share, unequally, the Indian peninsula and the continent of Europe. But the American and the Indo-European only met after an interval measurable by thousands of years, coming from opposite directions, and having made the circuit of the globe.

The Red-Man, it thus appears, is among the ancients of the earth. How old he may be it is impossible to determine; but with one American school of ethnologists, no historical antiquity is sufficient for him. The earliest contributions of the New World to the geological traces of man were little less startling, when first brought to light, than any that the European drift has since revealed. The island of Guadaloupe, one of the lesser Antilles, discovered by Columbus in 1493, furnished the first examples of fossil man, and of works of art imbedded in the solid rock. They seemed to the wondering naturalist to upset all preconceived ideas of the origin of the human race. But more careful investigation proved the rock to be a concretionary limestone formed from the detritus of corals and shells. The skeletons are probably by no means ancient, even according to the reckoning of American history; though supplying a curious link in the palæontological treasures both of the British Museum and the Jardin des Plantes. Dr. Lund, the Danish naturalist, has described human bones, bearing, as he believed, marks of geological antiquity, found along with those of many extinct mammals, in the calcareous caves of Brazil. Fossil human remains have also been recovered from a calcareous conglomerate of the coral reefs of Florida, estimated by Professor Agassiz to be not less than 10,000 years old;[^[4]] and the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia treasures the os innominatum of a human skeleton, a fragment of disputed antiquity, dug up near Natchez, on the Mississippi, beneath the bones of the megalonyx.[^[5]]

From those, and other discoveries of a like kind, this at least becomes apparent, that in the New World, as in the Old, the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters of archæology and ethnology. According to geological reckoning, much of the American continent has but recently emerged from the ocean. Among the organic remains of Canadian post-tertiary deposits are found the Phoca, Balœna, and other existing marine mammals and fishes along with the Elephas primigenius, the Mastodon Ohioticus, and other long-extinct species. Looking on the human skeletons of the Guadaloupe limestone in the Museums of London and Paris,—the first examples of the bones of man in a fossil state,—the gradation in form between him and other animals presents no very important contrast to the uninstructed eye. Modern though those rock-imbedded skeletons are, they accord with older traces of human remains mingling with those of extinct mammals, to which more recent speculations have given so novel an interest in relation to the question of the antiquity of man. The origin and duration of the American type still remain in obscurity. Man entered on the occupation of the New World in centuries which there, as elsewhere, stretch backward as we strive to explore them. His early history is lost, for it is not yet four centuries since its discovery; and he still survives there, as he then did, a being apart from all that specially distinguishes either the cultivated or the uncultured man of Europe. His continent, too, has become the stage whereon are being tested great problems in social science, in politics, and in ethnology. There the civilised man and the savage have been brought face to face to determine anew how far God “giveth to all life, and breath, and all things; and hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth; and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation.” There, too, the Black man and the Red, whose destinies seemed to separate them wide as the world’s hemispheres, have been brought together to try whether the African is more enduring than the indigenous American on his own soil; to try for us, also, as could no otherwise be tried, questions of amalgamation and hybridity, of development and perpetuity of varieties, of a dominant, a savage, and a servile race. In all ways: in its recoverable past, in its comprehensible present, in its conceivable future, the New World invites our study, with the promise of disclosures replete with interest in their bearing on secrets of the elder world.

CHAPTER II.
THE PRIMEVAL TRANSITION.

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]]

CHAPTER III.
THE QUARRY.

THE QUARRY—BRIXHAM CAVE—BRIXHAM FLINT IMPLEMENT—FLINT RIDGE, OHIO—FLINT PITS—DRIFT QUARRY DEPOSITS—TRACES OF PALÆOLITHIC ART—LANCEOLATE FLINTS—ALMOND-SHAPED FLINTS—THE SHAWNEES—THE COLORADO INDIANS—CACHES OF WORKED FLINTS—SEPULCHRAL DEPOSITS—CAVE-DRIFT DISCLOSURES—ILLUSTRATIVE ANALOGIES—CINCINNATI COLLECTIONS—HORNSTONE SPEAR-HEADS—AMERICAN NEOLITHIC ART—FLINT DRILLS—MODES OF PERFORATION—FLINT KNIVES—RAZORS AND SCRAPERS—ARROW-HEAD FORMS—DISCOIDAL STONES—SINKERS AND LASSO-STONES—CUPPED STONES—ARCHÆOLOGICAL THEORIES—GEORGIA BOULDERS—HAND CUP-STONES—NEOLITHIC GRINDSTONES—ARCHÆOLOGICAL ENIGMAS—ANCIENT ANALOGIES.

If mere rudeness is to be accepted as the indication of the first artless efforts of man to furnish himself with tools, the investigator into primeval history may assume that in the rudest of the drift and cave implements he has examples of the most infantile efforts in the industrial arts. He may even indulge the fancy that in the large, unshapely flint implements recovered from ossiferous caves and alluvial deposits, alongside of remains of the extinct fauna of a palæolithic period so dissimilar to any historical era, he has traced his way back to the first crude efforts of human art, if not to the evolutionary dawn of a semi-rational artificer. It is a significant fact that no such clumsy unshapeliness characterises the stone implements of the most degraded savage races. Examples may indeed be produced, selected for their rudeness, from among the implements of modern savages. But Bushmen, Patagonians, Mincopies, Australians, or whatever other race be lowest in the scale of humanity, each display ingenuity and skill in the manufacture of some special tools or weapons. Nor is it less worthy of note that the commoner implements and weapons of flint and stone recovered from ancient Scandinavian, Gaulish, and British graves, from the lake-dwellings of Switzerland, the Danish shell-mounds, and other European depositories of prehistoric industrial art, are scarcely distinguishable from the flint-knives, scrapers, lance and arrow-heads, or the stone gouges, axes, and mauls, of the Red Indians, or of the Islanders of the Pacific. Peculiar types do indeed occur; and the materials abounding in special localities, such as the obsidian of Mexico, or the greenstone of Tasmania, give a specific character to the implements of some regions; but, on the whole, the arts of the stone periods of different races, however widely separated alike by space and time, present so many analogies that they seem to confirm the idea of certain instinctive operations of human ingenuity finding everywhere the same expression within the narrow range of non-metallurgic art. Few facts, therefore, related to this branch of the subject have impressed me more than the essentially diverse types characteristic of the massive and extremely rude implements of the caves and river-drift. They seem to point to some unexplained difference between the artificer of the Mammoth or Reindeer period, and the tool-maker of Britain’s neolithic era, or the Indian savage of modern times.

Fig. 4.—Brixham Cave Flint Implement. (Evans). (½).

Sufficient correspondence is traceable between the implements of the cave-earth and the river-drift to assign them to the same era; and so to justify us in testing its arts by their combined disclosures. The ossiferous cave of Brixham, which has recently been subjected to an exhaustive scientific investigation, consists of a series of galleries and passages in the Devonshire limestone. They are partly natural fissures, and partly chambers hollowed out by the action of running water. Those have been refilled with gravel, red cave-earth, and layers of stalagmite, which were in process of deposition while the ursus spelæus, or great cave-bear, still haunted their recesses, and when the reindeer was a native of the neighbouring region. Though visited from time to time by man, Brixham cave had never been made his dwelling-place or workshop; and so it has revealed only his rudest tools. Of these, Fig. 4 is a characteristic example of a rude lanceolate implement, which embodies within itself some very significant glimpses of the era to which it belongs. The great valleys were excavated and refilled with the rolled gravel of the drift during the prolonged operations of ice and floods. But it is here seen that the violence of the floods extended even to the recesses of the caves. The implement has been broken into three pieces, evidently at the period of the original filling up of the cave. One portion was recovered buried in the cave-earth of the flint-knife gallery; another fragment lay far apart, under three and a half feet of earth, in a neighbouring gallery; while a third portion has escaped even the careful and discriminating search which resulted in the recovery of those long-dissevered fragments. It has to be borne in remembrance that every fragment of flint found in the cave-earth was preserved, whether showing traces of human workmanship or not. Thirty-two fragments were discovered in all; with an interval of nearly a month between the finding of the first and second portions of the implement figured here. A still longer period elapsed before it was noticed that they fitted to each other as parts of the same worked flint. Most of the fragments so found have undergone great alteration in their structure, and have become absorbent and brittle. How little chance, therefore, is there that any delicately formed flint-tool should be recovered in the rolled gravel-beds!

But the comparatively virgin soil of the New World has examples of like primitive workmanship in reserve, to illustrate the significance of some of those amorphous flints which bear the evidence of art, and yet seem almost too artless for any purpose of man. The valleys of the Ohio and its tributaries have a special attraction as the sites of numerous earthworks and other remains of a prehistoric race, known, from one prominent class of their structures, as the Mound-Builders. In more recent centuries, within the period of European intercourse with the New World, the same valleys have been occupied by warlike tribes of the Red Indian race; and now that an industrious population has supplanted their ephemeral lodges with the cities and farmsteads of the Anglo-American settler, the traces even of the latest aborigines seem primitive as those of Europe’s neolithic era. During the summer of 1874 I devoted part of the long vacation to an inspection of some of the most remarkable earthworks and other ancient remains of this interesting locality; and among other objects illustrative of its past history, I visited the Flint Ridge, a siliceous deposit of the carboniferous age, which extends through the State, from Newark to New Lexington, and has been worked at various points to furnish materials for native implements. Here I had an opportunity of exploring the ancient pits from which it is assumed that the constructors of the gigantic earthworks of the neighbouring valleys procured the flint, or hornstone, of which their weapons and implements were chiefly made. The point visited is on the summit of an undulating range of hills about ten miles distant from the city of Newark and its remarkable earthworks, hereafter described. At various points along the ridge, both there and in other parts of the State, numerous funnel-shaped pits occur, varying from four or five to fifteen feet deep; and similar traces of mining may be seen in other localities, as at Levenworth, about three hundred miles below Cincinnati, where the grey flint, or chert, abounds, of which large implements are chiefly made. The sloping sides of the pits are in many cases covered with the fractured flints, broken up, and partially shaped as if for purposes of manufacture. There for the first time I looked upon true counterparts of the drift implements; and in the course of an hour or two had no difficulty in procuring specimens closely repeating many forms familiar among those common to the cave-earth and the drift-gravel of France and England.

We are apt to think of the old flint and stone-workers as merely picking up the chance materials suited to their simple craft. But the use of flint in the manufacture of sling-stones, arrow-heads, and other missile weapons, as well as of all ordinary household implements, and those of war and the chase, involved a constant demand for fresh materials, frequently procurable only from distant localities. It is what might be assumed, therefore, apart from any direct evidence, that a regular system of quarrying for flint nodules best fitted for the tool-makers’ art was pursued; and that a trade or barter in the raw material furnished supplies to tribes remote from the flint-bearing chalk or gravel. But also it appears from the interesting explorations of Colonel A. Lane Fox at Cissbury, near Worthing,[^[33]] and from those of the Rev. W. Greenwell, at Grime’s Graves, near Brandon, in Norfolk,[^[34]] that the flint nodules were not only quarried, but prepared on the spot; so that the miner carried off with him, not a mere load of flint nodules, as the modern manufacturer might burden himself with the iron ore: but flints of the required dimensions, roughly shaped for the final operation which was to fashion them into knives, scrapers, arrow and lance-heads, hatchets, etc. Precisely the same process is manifest in the remains found in the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio. Flakes or spawls, knives, scrapers, almond and lanceolate blocks, abound in the first crude stage of manufacture. In studying those on the spot, I was strongly impressed by the similarity of many of them to the ruder implements of the drift; and hence was led to surmise that in the latter also we have in many cases, not the artless implements which fitly suggest a maker correspondingly deficient in even such skill and reasoning as guides the modern tool-making savage; but only rudely-blocked flints, fresh from the quarry, and in a condition least susceptible of injury in the violence to which the tool-bearing gravels have necessarily been subjected. May it not be, moreover, that in some of the richest deposits of such worked flints in the gravels of France and England, we have really the dispersed materials of such quarry accumulations, and not the stray implements of individual hunters? In this way only can we satisfactorily account for the fact that such traces of primeval man are now successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. The archæologist digs into the Celtic or Saxon barrow, and finds as his reward the implements and pottery of its builder. But English geologists, having determined the character of the tool-bearing gravel of the French drift, have sought for flint implements in corresponding English strata, as they would seek for the fossil shells of the same period, and with like success. They have now been obtained in Suffolk, Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey.[^[35]] So entirely indeed has the man of the drift passed out of the province of the archæologist, that in 1861 Professor Prestwich followed up his “notes on further discoveries of flint implements in beds of post-pleiocene gravel and clay,” with a list of forty-one localities where gravel and clay-pits, or gravel-beds occur, as some of the places in the south of England where he thought flint implements might also by diligent search possibly be found, and subsequent discoveries have confirmed his anticipations.

It has been felt by many as an element which in some degree detracted from the otherwise incontrovertible force of this accumulated proof, that where the wrought flints are discovered in situ, they occur in beds of gravel and clay abounding in unwrought flints in every stage of accidental fracture, and including many which the most experienced archæologist would hesitate whether to classify as of natural or artificial origin. But on the assumption of regular quarrying and working in the flint-bearing strata, such traces of palæolithic art may be expected to occur in the river-gravels, as a geological formation in which the requisite material abounded; and which, moreover, in its latest reconstruction belongs to the river-valleys best adapted to be the habitat of post-glacial man. They are, in fact, the localities to which the experience of the archæologist would direct him when in search of the traces of rude hunting and fishing tribes; but also they are the same mammaliferous strata to which the geologist turns when looking for remains illustrative of the extinct fauna of the post-glacial age.

Fig. 5.—Lanceolate Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio, (2/3).

In and around the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio, are now to be seen the accumulated results of centuries of mining and quarrying, extending in all probability from the era of the Mound-Builders to the extinction of the Miamis, Shawnees, and other recent occupants of the Ohio valley. Swept by floods into the lower valleys, the smaller fragments would be broken up and disappear; and only such specimens would survive unchanged as in the valley of the Somme have startled archæologists by their numbers; and tempted sceptics to assign their origin to accidental fracture in the beds of gravel and unwrought flints in which they chiefly occur. In Fig. 5 a worked flint is shown, picked up in one of the pits on Flint Ridge, in Licking County, Ohio. A small piece has been broken off the point by recent fracture. Its analogy to one familiar type of drift implements can scarcely admit of question. This, it will be remembered, had never been removed from the pit, and doubtless represents the material thus roughly blocked out, from which the old artificer designed to fashion a finished tool. Another common type is shown in Fig. 6, roughly chipped into the crude form of an almond-shaped blade. Some of the specimens acquired by me are weather-stained from long exposure, and others discoloured and brittle; but many of them exhibit little traces of the effect of time. It may be doubted, indeed, if any of them can be regarded as of remote antiquity; though, doubtless, the ancient Mound-Builders

Fig. 6.—Almond-shaped Flint, Flint Ridge, Ohio. (2/3).

derived the materials for their stone implements from this inexhaustible source; and specimens of the same class of worked flints are frequently met with in the vicinity of the mounds, and even among their contents. Flint-flakes, and rudely-fashioned knives and scrapers, are so common in the ploughed fields, that they are spoken of generally throughout Ohio and Kentucky by the name of “spawls.” It is difficult, indeed, to make a selection from the abundant materials illustrative of this part of the subject. The supply of flint, or its hornstone and chert equivalents, was inexhaustible; and its natural fracture and cleavage resulted in forms which frequently required little labour to convert them into useful household implements. The examples thus far figured were obtained directly from the Flint Ridge pits; but equally characteristic specimens lie intermingled with the finished axes and arrow-heads turned up by the plough, or recovered from the mounds. In the example figured here (Fig. 7), from the original ploughed up in Sharon Valley, Licking County, Ohio, in the vicinity of a large mound, the reader cannot fail to recognise an analogy to a familiar class of implements of the drift.

Fig. 7.—Leaf-shaped Flint, Sharon Valley, Ohio. (2/3).

The Shawnees, who last occupied the region now referred to, were a numerous and warlike tribe, who according to Indian tradition had come from Georgia and West Florida into the Ohio Valley. But they became involved in the French wars, joined in the famous conspiracy of Pontiac in 1763, and were nearly exterminated in a battle fought within two miles of the city of Newark. To them must, no doubt, be ascribed many of the flint and stone implements so abundant in the neighbouring valleys, as well as the partially worked flints in the numerous pits along Flint Ridge. But the material for the largest implements is here inexhaustible; and the natural lines of conchoidal fracture equally controlled the workmanship of the Troglodyte of the Drift, and the most recent Shawnee or Chippewa arrow-maker.

In the great mounds which abound throughout the region watered by the Ohio and its tributaries, delicately-wrought knives and arrow-heads, prized axe-heads, plummets and hemispheres of hæmatite, elaborately carved pipes, and even pins and bodkins of bone, lie buried along with the largest lanceolate and oval-shaped flints; or blocks of the same material, rough-hewn, as brought from the pits. A general and well-founded idea prevails that the old Mound-Builders, and, in some cases also, the modern Indians, were in the habit of making caches of flint-blocks, so as to protect the material from exposure to the atmosphere. The modern English gun-flint makers entertained the same idea, believing that a certain amount of moisture present in the flint was necessary for working it with ease, and that it lost this by long exposure. Professor J. W. Powell, in his report of explorations of the Colorado of the West, made in 1873, thus describes the method pursued by the Colorado Indians in the manufacture of their stone implements: “The obsidian, or other stone of which the implement is to be made, is first selected by breaking up larger masses of the rock, and choosing those which exhibit the fracture desired, and which are free of flaws; then these pieces are baked or steamed, perhaps I might say annealed, by placing them in damp earth covered with a brisk fire for twenty-four hours; then with sharp blows they are still further broken into flakes approximating to the shape and size desired. For the more complete fashioning of the implement a tool of horn, usually of the mountain sheep, but sometimes of the deer or antelope, is used. The flake of stone is held in one hand, placed on a little cushion made of untanned skin of some animal, to protect the hand from the flakes which are to be chipped off, and with a sudden pressure of the bone-tool the proper shape is given. They acquire great skill in this, and the art seems to be confined to but few persons, who manufacture them, and exchange them for other articles.”[^[36]] No doubt some of the simple bone implements found in the mounds were used for this purpose. I was shown recently, in Cincinnati, some well-made arrow-heads, the work of Dr. H. H. Hill, who informed me that his sole implement was the bone handle of a tooth-brush.

Among the many interesting disclosures due to the researches of Messrs. Squier and Davis, was the discovery in a mound of “Clark’s Work,” one of the largest earthworks in the Scioto Valley, of what may fairly be regarded as a magazine of such flint-blocks, fresh as from the quarry. Many of them are half a foot in length, but they vary in size and shape. Out of an excavation six feet long by four wide, nearly six hundred were taken. They lay regularly stacked, edge-ways, in two layers, one above the other; and the explorers estimated that the whole deposit might amount to four thousand discs of hornstone, roughly prepared for future manufacture.

Fig. 8.—Flint Implement, Licking County, Ohio. (1/1).

Blocks of flint from ten to twelve inches in length, fashioned in like manner into the nucleus of a lance or spear-head, have occurred from time to time in Denmark, France, and Belgium; and are to be looked for elsewhere: since implements of flint are common in many localities where the material out of which they are fashioned is wholly unknown. Those are rightly conjectured to be the raw material, which, like pig-iron, was thus ready to be turned to the special uses of the artificer. No doubt, by barter and traffic in various ways, such material for the flint-workers of Europe’s and America’s different stone periods was disseminated from centres where native flint occurs; just as in the later copper and Bronze periods of both continents the prized metals were diffused through remote areas. But it is only in localities where the flint abounds that implements, or even blocks or nuclei, of the largest size are of common occurrence. Fig. 8 represents one of the class of smaller rudely shaped flint implements recovered from a large mound in the vicinity of Newark. It indicates, alike in the discoloration and the change of the dulled surface, characteristic evidences of considerable antiquity. Thus buried in the mounds, or scattered about in the furrows of every ploughed field, slender flint-chips, knives, or spawls, with arrow-heads, axes, and other relics both of the Mound-Builders and their Indian successors, abound. The huge rough-hewn block of flint or hornstone takes its place as fittingly beside the delicately finished implements, as the prized lump of unwrought hæmatite, the large pyrula, or even the mass of copper or galena. Possibly they were deposited in the sepulchral mound to furnish to the dead the materials from which to fashion implements adapted to the new life on which he was about to enter. More probably, however, they were laid there simply as part of the ordinary furnishings adapted to the daily experiences of life. But if the Palæolithic tool-maker fashioned anything akin to the more delicate implements, the vicissitudes of diluvial and other geological changes have left few and partial illustrations of such finished handiwork of the Drift-folk. Their cave-dwellings did indeed admit, under specially favouring circumstances, of the occasional preservation of bone implements, the smaller knives and lances of flint, and other comparatively delicate objects used in indoor work; and the value of these as illustrations of the habits and usages of the ancient Troglodytes can scarcely be exaggerated. But even those owe their preservation to processes akin to that which fractured and dispersed the fragments of the Brixham Cave implement; and which, in the more violent rearrangement of the river-gravels, must have generally reduced any carved bone or delicately worked flint to indistinguishable fragments. The exceptions indeed are exceedingly rare of finding in the gravel-beds a single bone of any animal so small as man.

The caves also undoubtedly embody in the contents of their silt and stalagmite the industrial implements of a later period than that of the river-gravels; and, as in the case of Kent’s Cavern, even preserve the evidence of a succession of occupants belonging to distinct eras, and probably to essentially diverse races of men. But it is only in exceptional cases of special interest that the cave-drift discloses traces of actual habitation, the refuse heaps of the kitchen, the broken or stray tools, and even the flint-cores, hammer-stones, and flint-chips, which indicate the workshop of the ancient tool-maker. Mr. Evans figures hammer-stones of various kinds, made of diverse pebbles and of chipped flint; and others from the French caves consist of flint-cores with the prominent surfaces worn round by their use as hammer-stones in the process of chipping the flint into the desired forms. One of this class of implements now in my possession, of light grey flint, and bearing manifest traces of long use, was turned up in a ploughed field in Licking County, Ohio. Another example in my collection was presented to me by Mr. W. L. Merrin, who picked it up in the vicinity of one of the pits on Flint Ridge, among the broken flakes and nodules which showed where the old flint miner had been at work. The cave deposits embedded animal remains and human implements in part by the same processes which in neighbouring river-valleys were burying the works of man alongside of the bones of the largest fossil mammalia. In the former, at times, the silting up was by a process sufficiently gentle to preserve unharmed the minuter traces of the cave-dweller and his arts; but as a rule there have remained to us from that remote Palæotechnic era, only the larger and ruder implements, corresponding as it were to the axe of the woodman, and the mattock or plough of the field labourer, which were alone capable of withstanding the violence of floods, and the like elements of geological reconstruction.

Enough survives to us, from the disclosures of a different character in the actual cave-dwellings of the Men of the Drift, to confirm the idea that we have as yet obtained a very partial glimpse of the arts of that remote dawn; and that we may watch with interest every fresh disclosure calculated to lessen the wonder excited by the large lanceolate or ovate worked flints of that era: rude enough at times to be ascribed to some irrational Caliban, rather than to a human artificer. It may perhaps be thought that I have yielded too ready credence to a fanciful analogy; but as I explored the deserted flint pits of the Shawnees, and the ancient quarry of the Ohio Mound-Builders, or picked up in the furrows of their desecrated earthworks huge half-formed ovate and spear-shaped blocks of hornstone akin to those of the European drift, it seemed to me like a glimpse of light illuminating the obscurity of that remote dawn.

The whole region of Ohio and Kentucky is rich in remains of the old flint-workers. In the Granville, the Cherry, Sharon, Hanover, and other valleys around Newark, in the vicinity of Dayton, and at Fort Ancient, in Warren County, Ohio, all of which I had special facilities for exploring, as well as in numerous other localities throughout the State, flint and stone implements abound. In Cincinnati I examined large collections, chiefly obtained by searching along the banks of the Ohio and its tributaries after the spring floods. Occasionally fine specimens may be observed in situ, projecting from the eroded bank, at a depth of about twenty inches from the surface; but the greater number are picked up in the silt and gravel left by the falling river, while many more must be buried in its bed: to form, perchance, a subject of study for future generations, in the reconstructed river-valleys of a newer world. Their number indeed is astonishing, in the contrast which the virgin soil of the New World thus presents to the rare traces of Europe’s neolithic arts. One enthusiastic collector, Dr. Byrnes, of Cincinnati, told me that his most successful gleaning had been at a point near the junction of the Little Miami and Ohio rivers, where in one day he found upwards of seventy stone implements of various kinds, exposed by the ice and spring floods, on the river banks.

Fig. 9.—Flint Hoe, Kentucky. (1/3).

Many of the flint implements are finished with exquisite delicacy, to the finest serrated edge; while, no doubt owing to the abundant material, they are frequently on a scale considerably surpassing those of the European neolithic period. In the collections of Dr. Hill, Dr. Byrnes, and Mr. Hosea, of Cincinnati, I made drawings of flint-knives, spear-heads, and hoes, measuring nearly eleven inches in length. Fig. 9 shows an example of the latter implement, reduced to one-third, linear measure. It was found by Dr. Hill, on the river edge of the Ohio, near Smithland, Kentucky, and fully illustrates the character of the flint hoe. The broad end has been worked to an edge, and is fractured from use; while the narrow end terminates in a flat unworked surface, showing the natural texture of the nodule from which it has been made. The same collections above referred to include spear-heads of dark hornstone, from 6½ to 7 inches long, of which upwards of fifty were found on a farm in Casey County, Kentucky. On another farm in Jackson County, Indiana, the owner’s curiosity was excited by the large size of two or three spear-heads of dark grey hornstone turned up by the plough; and on digging down he found about ninety stacked edge-ways, one tier above another. Specimens of them examined by me in different collections measured from 4½ to 5 inches long. One of the smallest of them is figured here full size, Fig. 10. Along with some of these large spear-heads, Dr. Hill produced several beautifully finished leaf-shaped blades, chipped to a fine edge, measuring upwards of 5 inches long. They are worked in a pale grey hornstone speckled with white. Twelve of these were ploughed up in a level between two large mounds, near Brookville, Indiana; and ten perfect, with numerous broken specimens of a rarer type of large arrow-head, equally well finished, were found in the vicinity of another mound, near Anderson’s Ferry, a few miles below Cincinnati. The number of such implements in this region is astonishing; and frequently the beauty of a piece of milky-quartz, yellow chert, or pure rock crystal, appears to have stimulated the workman to his utmost dexterity in the manufacture of serrated, dentated, and elaborately finished blades of various forms.

Fig. 10.—Flint Spear-head, Indiana. (1/3).

In the collections I have named, as well as in those of Mr. Cleneay and Mr. James of Cincinnati, and of Mr. Merrin and Mr. Shrock of Newark, the examples of flint and stone implements number many hundreds, and would require a volume not less ample than Mr. John Evans’s comprehensive monograph of The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain, to illustrate their details. I shall limit myself here to a few examples selected from among those peculiar to the neolithic art of the New World which offer any suggestive hint relative to the origin or use of objects already familiar to the archæologist. Perforated teeth of bears and other animals occur among the mound relics; shell beads are still more abundant; bone and horn pins and lance-heads, and a peculiar class of stone implements, most frequently made of a striated, grey or blue shale, perforated with two or more holes, are all of common occurrence. The chief varieties are shown in the Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, Fig. 136, p. 237. Some of them bear so near a resemblance to the bracers, or guards, found in British graves, and supposed to have been worn on the left arm to protect it from the recoil of the string in the use of the bow, that I am inclined to ascribe the same purpose to them. But others are curved at the edges, and frequently of too large a size for this purpose. The latter are also occasionally formed of copper. One example of this class of implements, or personal decorations, obtained from the Lockport mound, and now in the possession of Mr. Merrin, measures 5·30 by 3·80 inches.

Fig. 11.—Flint Awl, Mayville, Kentucky. Fig. 12.—Flint Drill, Cincinnati.

The frequent occurrence of drilled and perforated stone and shell implements, tubes, pipes, etc., accounts for the finding of a variety of awls, or drills, made of flint and stone. Not only perforated shell-gorgets, stone tablets or guards, plummets, and the like relics, but also beads, bears’ teeth, and other pendants or personal ornaments of various kinds, have been found in the mounds. They correspond to some extent to a class of perforated shell and bone implements met with in the ancient cave deposits of France and England; and the flint awls or borers by which they were drilled have been recognised among the rarer objects of the neolithic period found in England, France, Denmark, and in the Swiss Lake-dwellings.[^[37]] Figs. 11, 12 are good examples of two types of such tools in use by the ancient flint-workers of the Ohio Valley. Fig. 11 was found by its present owner, Mr. James Pierce, near Mayville, Kentucky. The square butt which forms the handle retains the natural shape of the block of yellow chert of which it is made, while the chipped surfaces of the blade show the dark grey colour of the core. Fig. 12 is a larger and ruder example of the flint drill, from the collection of Dr. Hill, of Cincinnati, probably designed to be attached to a wooden haft, and used for operations on a larger scale. A more carefully finished small flint-awl, with a neatly worked handle, but unfortunately broken at the point, was presented to me by Mr. Merrin, of Newark, who picked it up in a field in that vicinity. A drill of a different kind is shown in Fig. 13, also from the collection of Dr. Hill.

Fig. 13.—Stone Drill, Cincinnati. Fig. 14.—Flint-Knife, Cincinnati.

It is of diorite, and at the first glance might be taken for a stone arrow-head. But it is worn perfectly smooth along its two edges, especially towards the point, evidently from continuous use in the perforation of some hard substance, such as might result in the hollowing out of the bowl of a stone pipe: though such an instrument would be called into use in many operations of the old flint-workers. Knives and razors of diverse forms, and some of them finished with great care, at times in very fantastic shapes, are also of frequent occurrence. Their unusual shapes are probably in part due to the chance fracture of the flint-flakes, specimens of which abound in the pits on Flint Ridge, frequently requiring little manipulation to convert them into cutting implements. Fig. 14 is a small knife of this class, selected from several in the collection of Dr. Hill. It is made of yellow chert, and has a keen cutting edge. But there is another class of flint-knives not unfamiliar to European archæologists, of which interesting examples occur. A good American specimen of the flint-core, such as has been found in Kent’s Cavern, and elsewhere on British sites, and is common among the neolithic relics of Denmark, is now in my possession. It was picked up in the Granville valley, Licking county, Ohio, not far from the famous Alligator Mound; and shows the facets from which long curved flakes have been struck off. The curved form which the flake naturally assumes is frequently retained in the finished implements, along with three facets, forming an acute triangular blade, coming to a sharp edge.

Fig. 15.—Flint Razor, Kentucky.

The Mexican obsidian is characterised by the same fracture; and some of the early Spanish writers enlarge on the keenness of the edge of the obsidian razors, as scarcely inferior to those of steel, though they speedily lose their edge. A good example of the flint razor is shown in Fig. 15, from the collection of Mr. James Pierce of Mayville, Kentucky. It is one of the outer flakes of the core, coming to a good edge on the one side, and chipped to a broad back. Fitted with a wooden haft, it would form a convenient cutting implement for many purposes. It is shown here nearly 5-6ths of the original size. The natural cleavage of the flint, thus controlling the forms which the fractured nodules assume, has tended to beget certain classes of implements common to all the stone periods of which we have any trace, from the palæolithic era of the drift and cave-men to that of the flint-workers among savage tribes of our own day. Horse-shoe, pear-shaped, oval, discoidal, and other scrapers abound among the more familiar implements of the old American flint-workers, reproducing all the forms common to the early stone periods of Europe, and which have been minutely illustrated by Mr. Evans.[^[38]] But there is another type of scraper, of a more finished character,

Fig. 16-17.—Flint Scrapers, Ohio.

which frequently occurs among American flint implements, of which I am not aware that any example has hitherto been noted in Europe. In its more common form it might be mistaken at the first glance for a broken arrow-head. But the repeated occurrence of examples of this type, with the well-finished edge invariably inclining, with a curve, to the one side, leaves no room for doubt as to its purpose as a scraper, designed to be fastened to a haft, and used for fashioning needles, bodkins, lance-heads, and other implements of ivory, bone, or horn. This type is shown in Fig. 16, picked up in the neighbourhood of Newark. Fig. 17 is another common form, with the edge wrought to one side, but with slighter curve, or inclination otherwise to the side. Both of these are figured the full size; but many specimens occur of larger sizes, and varying curves of the blade, from a long horse-shoe to a broad crescent shape. There are also arrow-heads of analogous forms, but with no curve in the blade. Similar arrow-heads are now made by the Blackfeet Indians out of iron hoops obtained from the Hudson Bay fur traders, and it is said that with those a skilful marksman will behead a bird on the wing. Others of the rarer forms of flint implements include foliated, flamboyant, or fantastically-shaped arrow-heads, and the like implements, of which an example is shown in Fig. 18, and for which it is difficult to assign any specific use. Some of them, indeed, look like the sports of an ingenious workman tempted by chance forms of the fractured flint to try his hand at some fanciful knife, arrow-head, or other implement of unwonted design.

Fig. 18.—Foliated Arrow-head.

Discoidal stones, somewhat varying in form and size, are common in the valley of the Ohio, and throughout the Southern States. Messrs. Squier and Davis figure two examples found by them along with an unusually rich deposit of choice relics, including several coiled serpents carved in stone, and carefully enveloped in sheet mica and copper, under a mound within the great earthwork of Paints Creek. The discoidal stones found there are made of a very dense ferruginous stone, of a dark brown ground interspersed with specks of yellow mica. Others are of granite, porphyry, jasper, greenstone, and quartz, sometimes with concave surfaces, or perforated with a funnel-shaped hollow on either side; but always of a hard stone, and highly polished. One fine specimen in the collection of Dr. Byrnes is of polished novaculite, and another of quartz. The largest are about six inches in diameter, and are generally finished with great symmetry. There is no doubt that such implements were employed among the Southern Indians, subsequent to their being visited by Europeans, in certain favourite games. Adair describes their use; and adds that they were so highly valued “that they were kept with the strictest religious care from one generation to another; and were exempted from being buried with the dead.” It may be that in some of them we have implements used in the games which formed a prominent part in the sacred festivities, for which it is assumed that the great geometrical earthworks were constructed. Indeed the perfect symmetry of form in the majority of this class of relics seems to accord with the idea of their having been fashioned by the race who have left such gigantic memorials of their regard for geometrical configuration. One perforated discoidal stone, of polished granite, which I examined at Cincinnati, was dug up by Dr. J. H. Hunt, within a large earthwork at Cleves, near the great Miami River; and another in the possession of Dr. Byrnes was found in the vicinity of one of the great mounds on the Ohio.

Among the rarer stone implements which occur among the relics of Europe’s neolithic arts are certain objects which, though of small size, otherwise so closely resemble the most highly finished mining hammers that they have been generally designated hammer-stones. A more careful and discriminating study of them, however, has led to the assignment of them to a totally different purpose. An example found near Ambleside, Westmoreland, and figured in the Archæological Journal,[^[39]] shows a well-finished ovoid implement of stone, with a deep groove round the middle. Others have been repeatedly found in the neighbourhood of the English lakes, as well as in other localities; and as they show no traces of being battered or worn from use in hammering, and are frequently made of sandstone or other material unsuited for such a purpose, they are now generally regarded as sinkers for nets or fishing lines. Objects of nearly similar form, but most frequently made of diorite, granite, or other equally hard rocks, occur among the stone implements of the Ohio Valley. Many of them measure from 3 to 4 inches long. But while in them also the absence of any marks of abrasion or battering serves to show that they were not used as hammers, a hard and heavy material appears to have been preferred in their construction. Hence it has been surmised that they were the weights attached to a hunting thong, or lasso; though they would equally serve as sinkers for the fisherman’s nets. One of them, from a mound in Kentucky, is shown in Fig. 19. It is of granite, and carefully finished, but a hard siliceous concretion at one end has resisted the efforts of the workman to reduce it to perfect symmetry. The attempt to determine the uses for which implements were made, under circumstances so wholly different from everything we are familiar with, is at best guesswork. But it seems unlikely that so much labour and skill would be expended in fashioning such intractable material into symmetrical shape for a mere net-sinker. In the collection of Mr. Merrin is a large implement of the same form, weighing fully eighteen pounds. It was found on the site of the Lockport Mound, at Newark, along with numerous other stone, shell, mica, and copper relics. Its size and weight at once suggest the idea of its use as a miner’s maul; but it is made of sandstone, and retains no traces of use as a hammer. It is equally inapplicable for the hunter’s lasso and the fisher’s net; and if designed for a weight, must have been for some very different purpose.

Fig. 19.—Lasso Stone, Kentucky.

Among various novel relics of the Ohio Valley which attracted my notice from their resemblance to others familiar to European archæologists, was a class of cupped stones, very abundant in many localities. In 1867 Sir James Y. Simpson published an elaborate and nearly exhaustive disquisition on “Archaic stones and rocks in Scotland, England, and other countries”; and about the same time Algernon, Duke of Northumberland, undertook the illustration of the same class of relics in his own district. The work was projected on a large scale, and did not appear till after his death, when a large imperial folio was produced, entitled “Incised Markings on Stone found in the County of Northumberland, Argyleshire, &c.” The simplest types of this class of archaic sculpturings consist of rounded depressions, or “cups,” formed in the surface of rocks and standing-stones, and varying from 1 to 3 inches in diameter. Those are scattered irregularly over the surface. But another class has the cups surrounded by concentric rings, and with lines leading from one group to another, with so much apparent system as to have suggested the idea of their being specimens of primitive chorography, not unlike the delineations which I have seen made by an Indian on a bit of birch-bark, in order to indicate the geography of a locality. They have, in fact, been supposed to be maps, whether of the Celtic Britons, or of some older people, and to represent the chief towns, or intrenched strongholds, and neighbouring villages or encampments, with the roads leading from one to another. But while the cup-like hollows constitute their main features, the accompanying linear marks vary sufficiently to afford antiquarian fancy and conjecture ample scope in assigning their origin or use. They have accordingly been described as Phœnician, Druidical, Mithraic; as originating in the worship of Baal, or of the Persian Sun-god; as the blood-focuses of Druid altars; emblems of female Lingam worship; Sabean astronomical devices; or as in some way or other recognisable as possessing a sacred or religious character.

Fig. 20.—Cupped-stone, Ohio.

Attention had not been long directed to the cup sculpturings in Britain, when Professor Nilsson reported their occurrence on Scandinavian standing-stones; Dr. Keller recognised their presence on the rocks and boulders of Switzerland; and now it appears that they are no less common in Ohio and Kentucky, and extend southward into Georgia and other states of the Gulf. Fig. 20 represents a cupped sandstone block on the banks of the Ohio, a little below Cincinnati. Others, much larger, were described to me by Dr. Hill. One above Mayville has thirty-nine cups, and another, close to the river’s bank, eighty of the same characteristic hollows, with other linear and circular carvings. Mr. Charles C. Jones figures, in his Antiquities of the Southern Indians, a sculptured boulder of fine-grained granite in Forsyth county, Georgia, which in more than one respect is the precise counterpart of ancient British ring and cup sculpturings. Like the cap-stone of the Bonnington Cromlech, the Old Bewick block described by Sir J. Y. Simpson, and the Lancresse Cromlech in the Channel Islands: the Georgia boulder has a row of cups, or drilled holes, running along one side, while its surface is indented with cup-like hollows from a half to three-quarters of an inch deep, with concentric rings and connecting lines closely resembling the sculpturings on some of the ancient Scottish stones. In Georgia they are assumed to be the work of the Cherokees; but Mr. Jones adds: “No interpretation of these figures has been offered, nor is it known by whom or for what purpose they were made.”[^[40]] But besides the large rock sculptures, numerous small stones occur in the ploughed fields with similar cups wrought in them. They are mostly of rough-grained sandstone, frequently with several holes irregularly disposed on more than one surface; and closely corresponding to examples figured by Dr. Keller, some of which were procured from the lake-dwellings of Neuchâtel. I gathered several specimens, and could have obtained many more on Ohio farms, including both the smoothly hollowed cups, from one to two and a half inches in diameter, and those where the hollow is roughly picked out, or only partially worn into a smoothly rounded cup. Some of those examples were found in neighbouring fields, while engaged in excavating the Evans Mound, in Sharon Valley, near Newark, where also I obtained both polished axes and mullers. The cupped stones were of a coarse-grained sandstone, with the depressions occurring irregularly on both sides, and occasionally so close as to run into each other. Into these the rounded ends of the stone axes and pestles fitted, and the two classes of objects seemed complements of each other. Here was the roughly picked hollow, gradually worn into a smooth rounded depression, in the process, as I conceive, of grinding the ends of stone axes, maize-crushers, pestles, and the like implements, some of which fitted exactly into the cups. As the hollow gradually wore too large, a new one was made. The edges of the smaller cup-stones also frequently show evidence of their use in grinding down the surfaces of such stone implements. Such, however, is not the theory which finds favour in the Ohio Valley. There the hickory, or native walnut, abounds, with its hard shell, defying all ordinary efforts to reach the tempting kernel. But the boys have learned to hunt up a cupped stone, and placing the nut in its hollow, it is fractured at a blow with another stone, and its contents secured. Hence such objects are called nut-stones; and Mr. C. C. Jones, in his Antiquities of the Southern Indians, has adopted both the name and the idea implied in it, in spite of the occurrence of the same cups or depressions on rocks and boulders altogether inapplicable for such a purpose.[^[41]]

Fig. 21.—Cupped Boulder, Tronton, Ohio.

Whatever may have been the purpose of the cupped stones, they were not unknown to the ancient Mound-Builders. Messrs. Squier and Davis state that “in opening one of the mounds, a block of compact sandstone was discovered, in which were several circular depressions, in all respects resembling those in the work-blocks of coppersmiths, in which plates of metal are hammered to give them convexity.” These accordingly they suppose to have been the moulds in which the copper bosses and discs were formed, of which numerous examples have been obtained from the mounds.

A highly characteristic example of what may not inaptly be styled a neolithic grindstone was found near Tronton, Ohio, in the summer of 1874. It is a large sandstone boulder, as shown in Fig. 21, covered with cups, or pits; and also, as will be seen, with long grooves, which suffice to prove its use as a stone for shaping and polishing tools. This adds confirmation to the probable origin of the cups from a like cause. Since I drew attention to the subject, I have been informed of the discovery of numerous similarly indented and grooved rocks along the shores of the Ohio river, including some of the hard granite, or Laurentian boulders. But gritty sandstone rocks appear to have been preferred.

The supposition that the cups on large boulders and small sandstone grinders may alike be referred to the manipulations of the stone tool-maker, leaves the more elaborate accompaniments of concentric rings and linear devices unaccounted for; though it seems to me less improbable that these additions—which are thus found among other traces of the Cherokees and Shawnees of the new world, as well as amid the remains of Europe’s prehistoric races,—may be no more than supplements of an idle fancy added to the hollows which originated in the needful grinding of flint and stone implements into their required forms, than that they are mysterious religious symbols. Yet there is a fascination in the idea that they are “archæological enigmas”: Phœnician, Mithraic, Sabean, or Druidical; “lapidary hieroglyphics and symbols,” as Sir J. Y. Simpson assumes, “the key to whose mysterious import has been lost, and probably may never be regained.”[^[42]] “They are,” he again says, “too decidedly ‘things of the past’ for even the most traditional of human races to have retained the slightest recollection of them”; and, as in his attempt to determine the race to which to refer them he follows up the glimpses of their occurrence beyond the British Isles, he asks: “Are they common in countries which the Celtic race never reached? still more, are they to be found in the lands of the Lap, Finlander, or Basque, which apparently neither the Celt nor any other Aryan ever occupied? Do they appear in Asia within the bounds of the Aryan or Semitic races? Or can they be traced in Africa, or in any localities belonging to the Hamitic branches of mankind? Do they exist upon the stones or rocks of America or Polynesia?”[^[43]] If my theory is correct, they may be looked for in all. It is with tender memories of a dearly valued friend that I render the response, that such sculptured cups do exist upon the stones and rocks of America, and amply justify the reference of those of the Old World to Europe’s neolithic age, when the men of its polished Stone Period were grinding and working into perfected form the most prized relics of their laborious art.

The explanation thus derived from the traces of America’s native savage arts, in possible elucidation of a class of archaic European sculptures which have been made the subject of such learned speculation and research, may seem too artless to be substituted for theories of religious symbolism or rites of worship. But the ancient evidences of artistic labour in either hemisphere accord with the idea that man’s earliest arts were of the most practical kind. He did, indeed, find leisure to ornament the tools designed for common uses; and gave play to his imitative faculty in drawings and carvings which answered no other end than the pleasure the draughtsman in all ages has derived from the manifestation of his skill in the arts. But the grafting of recondite theories of symbolism and ritualistic devices either on such delineations, or on the simpler evidences of his handiwork, is apt to lead us astray into fanciful and profitless speculations, wholly apart from the true significance of such traces of primitive mechanical ingenuity as reveal the presence of man even on the skirts of ancient glaciers, and among the drift-gravels, of Europe’s post-pleiocene dawn.

CHAPTER IV.
BONE AND IVORY WORKERS.

BONE AND IVORY WORKERS—SUBSTITUTES FOR FLINT—PROOFS OF RELATIVE AGE—DOMESTIC BONE IMPLEMENTS—RUDE PALÆOLITHIC ART—WHALEBONE WORKERS—PRIMITIVE WORKING TOOLS—FISH-SPEARS AND HARPOONS—ARTISTIC INGENUITY—DRAWING OF THE MAMMOTH—THE MADELAINE ETCHINGS—RIGHT-HANDED WORKERS—DEERHORN QUARRY PICKS—BONE-BRACER OR GUARD—BIRTHTIME OF THE FINE-ARTS—INNUIT CARVERS OF ALASKA—TROGLODYTES OF CENTRAL FRANCE—POST-GLACIAL MAN—SYMMETRICAL HEAD-FORM—INTELLECTUAL VIGOUR—EVIDENCE OF LATENT POWERS—TAWATIN IVORY CARVING—LAKE-DWELLERS’ IMPLEMENTS—CAVE IMPLEMENTS—ARTS OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDERS—CARIB SHELL-KNIVES—ABORIGINES OF THE ANTILLES—CARIBS OF ST. DOMINGO—CAVE PICTURES AND CARVINGS—PRIZED TROPICAL SHELLS—ANCIENT GRAVES OF TENNESSEE—SHELL MANUFACTURES—HURON AND PETUN GRAVES—SACRED SHELL-VESSELS—PRIMITIVE SHELL ORNAMENTS—AMERICAN SHELL MOUNDS—A SHELL CURRENCY—IOQUA STANDARD OF VALUE.

The nearest type which we can now conceive of to the Drift-Folk of Europe’s post-glacial era is the Esquimaux. It is even possible that, like them, they may have occupied winter snow-huts; and only retreated to their cave-dwellings during the brief heat of a semi-arctic summer. Among a people so situated the industrial arts are called into utmost requisition, alike for clothing and tools; and the simplest experience of the hunter directs him to the produce of the chase for the most easy supply of both. The pointed horn of the deer furnishes the ready-made dagger, lance-head, and harpoon; the incisor tooth of the larger rodents supplies a more delicately edged chisel than primitive art could devise; and the very process of fracturing the bones of the larger mammalia in order to obtain the prized marrow, produces the splinters and pointed fragments which an easy manipulation converts into bodkins, hair-pins, and needles. The ivory of walrus, narwhal, or elephant is more readily wrought into many desirable forms, and is less liable to fracture, than the intractable flint or stone; and all those materials are abundant in the most rigorous winters, when flint and stone are sealed up under the frozen soil. Tools and weapons of bone and ivory may therefore be assumed to have preceded all but the rudest stone implements; and although, owing to the indestructible nature of their material, it is from the latter that our ideas of earliest post-glacial art are chiefly derived, enough has been found in contemporary cave-deposits to confirm this inference from the analogous hyperborean arts of our own day.

Flint, indeed, though so widely used as the primitive tool-maker’s material, is unknown in many localities. We are familiar with regions at the present time, where man not only subsists, but supplies himself with implements and weapons adapted to his need, though neither flint nor stone is available. This fact has been practically ignored in the accepted terminology of the science. As now reduced to system, it proceeds in retrospective order thus:—Historic, prehistoric, neolithic, palæolithic, with a possible protolithic period of still older geological epochs. An awkward misnomer inevitably results from this assumption of stone as the sole basis of primitive art: as where the archæologist speaks of palæolithic bone implements, or neolithic pottery. I have therefore substituted here the more comprehensive terms palæotechnic and neotechnic. They suffice equally for the classification of implements and personal ornaments of flint, stone, bone, ivory, or even of metal: as in the neotechnic gold and bronze work; and also for those made from marine shells. Many of the latter have been recovered under circumstances which establish their claim to be classed with other examples of primitive art; and even find illustration among the rarer disclosures of the ancient cave-drift. In the great Archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, as well as in widely scattered islands of the Pacific Ocean, the primeval stage of native art might indeed be more correctly designated a shell period; for until their discovery by Europeans, the large shells which the mollusca of the neighbouring oceans produce in great abundance, furnished to the native artificers the most convenient and easily wrought material. For the natives of the coral islands of the Pacific especially, marine shells supplied the want not only of copper and iron, but of flint and stone; and left them at little disadvantage when compared, for example, with the Indians of the copper regions of Lake Superior.

Fig. 22.—Bone Spatula, Keiss. Fig. 23.—Bone Comb, Burghar. Fig. 24.—Bone Comb, Burghar.

Alike in the ivory and bone carvings of the modern Esquimaux, and in the rare but invaluable evidences of primitive art furnished by those of the ancient Cave-Folk of the Dordogne and other oldest human dwellings, it is seen how favourable such easily wrought material was to the development of a mechanical skill and artistic ingenuity such as must have lain dormant had the primitive artificers been wholly limited to flint and stone. The same result is traceable, though in a less degree, to the analogous material of the Islanders’ shell-period. But implements and ornaments made of marine shells have a further interest from the evidence they occasionally afford of distant traffic, or interchange of foreign commodities.

Tools of horn, bone, and ivory possess a value of another kind. With them, as on a common ground, the palæontologist and the archæologist meet and determine the relative ages of the primitive artist and his materials. In the Glamorganshire cavern at Paviland Dr. Buckland found the skull of a mammoth, or other fossil proboscidian, and beside it the remains of cylindrical rods and armlets made from its ivory. In the famous Aurignac cave, on the northern slope of the Pyrenees, were arrows and other implements of reindeer horn, a bodkin fashioned out of the horn of the roedeer, and a tusk of the ursus spelæus, perforated and carved in imitation of the head of a bird. The Dordogne caves in like manner reveal the natives of Southern France in its old post-glacial era, hunting the aurochs and reindeer, and fashioning their horns and bones into lances, bodkins, needles, clubs, ceremonial or official batons, and other implements of varied purpose and design. Among the “prehistoric remains of Caithness,” which rewarded the explorations of Mr. Samuel Laing in the mounds at Keiss, were numerous implements made from the horns and bones of the reindeer, red-deer, ox, horse, and whale. Some of them are of the rudest character; and all indicate a condition of life akin to that of the tribes of the Labrador, or the Alaska coast at the present day. Fig. 22 is a spatula roughly formed from the bone of an ox; unless, as Mr. Joseph Anderson has suggested, it be the first stage in the process of fabricating a comb, of the type shown in Figs. 23, 24. The latter, found at Burghar, in Orkney, is a precise counterpart of the long-handled combs still in use by the Esquimaux for separating the sinew-threads, which supply them with one important resource in making their clothing. Those relics point to times when the fauna differed even more than the men of this era from those of the present day. In the mounds of the Ohio Valley, on the other hand, the bone implements and animal remains appear to be referable to existing species; and so supply evidence in contradiction of the extreme antiquity assigned by some to the mounds and their builders. One special value of primitive tools of horn, bone, and ivory is thus manifest. They embody glimpses of truth in relation to climate, native fauna, culinary practices, and special objects of the chase; and to this easily worked material we owe disclosures of an æsthetic faculty, and of artistic capabilities pertaining to the Troglodytes of the Dordogne, to whom, but for such evidence, might, and probably would have been assigned a rank in humanity as far below the standard of the modern savage as the Patagonian or Australian falls short of that of the average European of our own day.

The artificial origin of many of the rudest of the worked drift-flints has been challenged. But of the human workmanship of the large flint implement found alongside of the bones of a fossil elephant in the quaternary gravels of the London basin, near Gray’s Inn Lane; or of the spear-heads which lay under similar fossil bones in the drift of the valley of the Waveney, at Hoxne, in Suffolk, no doubt has ever been suggested. Both were discovered upwards of a century before the idea of man’s contemporaneous existence with the mammals of the drift had been mooted; but if such specimens of his art are to be made the sole test of human capacity in that primeval era, they might justify the idea of some lower type even than the wretched Patagonian or Australian. But contemporary cave deposits check our conclusions from such partial evidence; and suggest that in those rudest specimens of palæolithic art we have only the most indestructible relics of an epoch by no means destitute of inventive ingenuity or artistic skill.

All the cave deposits referred to were accompanied with human remains. In the Glamorganshire Cavern a female skeleton lay in close proximity to the skull of the fossil elephas, embedded in a mass of argillaceous loam. Adapting his deductions to the ruling idea which then guided the author of the Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, Dr. Buckland refers to the cylindrical rods and rings of ivory as “made from part of the antediluvian tusks that lay in the same cave; and,” he adds, “as they must have been cut to their present shape at a time when the ivory was hard, and not crumbling to pieces as it is at present on the slightest touch, we may from this circumstance assume to them a high antiquity.” Dr. Buckland’s idea of the antiquity implied by such cave remains was very different from what is now universally accepted. But it is not to be overlooked that here, as in the Aurignac, and other sepulchral caverns, the interment may belong to an epoch long subsequent to that of the fossil mammals. The tusk of a mammoth from the Carse of Falkirk, now in detached pieces in the museum of the University of Edinburgh, was rescued from the lathe of an ivory-turner; and the fossil ivory of Siberia is a regular article of commerce.

But in other examples of a like character we are left in no doubt. The deer’s-horn harpoons of the whalers of Blair-Drummond Moss are unquestionably contemporaneous with the fossil whales; and although the implements are rude enough, they will class with harpoons and fish-spears here described, some of which have been found associated with works in bone and ivory of great ingenuity and skill. The Greenland whale undoubtedly haunted the northern shores of Scotland within historic times. Its bones occur in Scottish brochs and kitchen-middens; and among the many traces of prehistoric arts and habits of life disclosed by the contents of the Scottish subterranean dwellings, one of the most interesting is a large drinking-cup fashioned from the vertebra of a whale. It was found in a weem on the Isle of Eday, in Orkney, along with a bone scoop, bone pins, combs, and other primitive relics, including some of metal. The cup measures 4½ inches high; and, as shown in Fig. 25, is a very simple adaptation of the natural form of the bone by sawing off the protruding spinous processes.

Fig. 25.—Whale’s Vertebra Cup.

The ancient workman had his knife, saw, adze, chisel, drill, and scraper,—or plane, as we may term it,—all made of flint. The worn and triturated edges of many of those flint-tools show abundant evidence of their use in fashioning some hard substance. He had also his file, made of grit-stone; of which various examples have been found in the caves. They are generally styled whetstones; but their purpose was probably the very same as that of a modern file. Some are of coarse-grained stone, and others of a finer grit. Without some such tools it would have been impossible to bring the more elaborate implements of bone and ivory to the state of finish which they present. Among such, the harpoons and fish-spears furnish a variety of types, diversified by the ingenuity of the workman, and the necessities of his craft. Examples of such primitive fishing implements of widely different eras are here grouped together. The three-pronged fish-spear, Fig. 26, illustrates the art of the Esquimaux fisherman: that living race of Arctic seas, which alike in arts and in condition of life, realises for us in so many ways the men of Europe’s post-glacial age. Alongside of it are a hook, or spear-head of deer’s-horn, Fig. 27, and a barbed fish-spear of the same material, Fig. 28, both the work of the ancient Lake-dwellers

Fig. 26-30.—Fish-spears and Harpoons.

of Neuchâtel. They present interesting analogies to the most familiar types of bone or ivory fish-spears of the French and English post-glacial era, of which Figs. 29, 30 are examples from the Dordogne Caves. Fig. 31, though worn and fractured, illustrates a form of the cave harpoon-blade, barbed only on one side. It is from Kent’s Cavern, where other, though less perfect, examples have been found. One of these, figured by Mr. Evans,[^[44]] is specially noticeable for its curved form. Similar implements have repeatedly occurred in the cave-deposits, as in those of the Dordogne, and at Bruniquel, where also serrated flints or saws were found in unusual abundance. Fig. 36, from the cave of La Madelaine, is a good example of the unilateral fish-spear, much superior in workmanship to the similar implement of the modern Fuegian, shown in Fig. 33, and well adapted to the wants of a river-fisherman. But the form of the Kent’s Cavern type rather suggests that it was one of the blades of a large two-pronged, or three-pronged spear, similar to examples still in use among the Esquimaux:

Fig. 31.—Harpoon, Kent’s Cavern.

Fig. 32.—Bone Spear-head, Dordogne Caves.

Fig. 33.—Fuegian Harpoon.

of which one, now in the museum of the University of Toronto, shown in Fig. 26, illustrates the probable design of the curved blades. In the caves of the Dordogne and Garonne valleys repeated discoveries of bone needles, in association with the barbed fish-spear, have been noted. They are objects of delicate manipulation, the value of which is proved by the occurrence of examples accidentally broken, and drilled with a new eye. The caves of the Dordogne pertained, even in the remote era of the mammoth or reindeer periods, to a race of inland hunters and fishermen to whom such a harpoon would have been cumbrous, if not wholly unsuited to their requirements. But the Kent’s Hole Troglodyte had probably more formidable prey to encounter, and so adapted the implements of the chase to his special requirements. Of the bilateral barbed fish-spear, a good, though imperfect example is shown, the natural size, in Fig. 32, from Laugerie Basse, in the Dordogne. Another, Fig. 34, was found imbedded in the red cave-earth of Kent’s Cavern, underneath a bed of black earth, containing flint-flakes and bones of extinct mammals, over which the stalagmitic flooring had accumulated to a thickness of a foot and a half. Similar implements have been recovered from other Dordogne Caves. Fig. 35, from La Madelaine, is a variation of the latter type, in which the barbs are disposed alternately on either side.

Fig. 34.—Fish-spear, Kent’s Cavern.

Fig. 35.—Fish-spear with bilateral barbs, La Madelaine.

Fig. 36.—Fish-spear with unilateral barbs, La Madelaine.

It is alike interesting and highly suggestive of the characteristics of man as a rational being, thus to find his ingenuity, when stimulated by similar necessities, begetting closely analogous results in ages separated by intervals so vast that we vainly strive to measure them by any standards of historical chronology. But the ingenuity manifested in the construction of his fishing and hunting gear very inadequately reveals to us the aptitudes of the men of the drift or the cave periods. In those remote epochs, as now, man was an intelligent being, gratifying his taste in many ways by works often involving great labour, and leading to no other practical results than many labours of the carver and house-decorator, the painter, sculptor, and engraver of our own day. Among the works of art, for example, of the cave-men of the Dordogne, contemporary with the mammoth and the reindeer of Central France, various incised drawings of animals, executed both on bone and slate, apparently with a flint stylus or graver, have excited an unusual interest. They include representations of the fossil horse, as on a carved baton, or mace, Fig. 37; of the reindeer, in groups, and engaged in combat; of the ox, fish of different kinds, flowers, ornamental patterns, and some ruder attempts at the human form. Carvings in bone and ivory illustrate the same ingenious mimetic art. But the most remarkable of all is the portraiture of the mammoth, Fig. 38, outlined on a plate of ivory, and to all appearance drawn from the life. It represents the extinct elephant, sketched with great freedom and even artistic skill; and not only compares favourably with the best specimens of modern savage delineation, but exhibits so much freedom of handling as to look more like the sketch of an artist skilled in the use of his pencil. I can recall no example of savage art exhibiting such freedom; and none but an experienced draughtsman could execute with pencil or etching-needle anything approaching to the expression and character given by means of a few lines, executed with no laboured effort, but evidently dashed off by one who had full confidence in his powers.

Fig. 37.—Carved Baton, or Mace (1/3).

This most ancient example of imitative art was found in the Madelaine Cave, on the river Vézère, by M. Lartet, when in company with M. Verneuil and Dr. Falconer. The circumstances of the discovery, therefore, no less than the character of the explorers, place its genuineness beyond suspicion. Its worth is great as a piece of contemporary portraiture of an animal known to us only by its fossil remains. But this sinks into insignificance in comparison with its value as a gauge of the intellectual capacity of the men of the reindeer age of central Europe. Many of their carvings ornament the horn or ivory handles of implements and weapons; but the etching referred to was manifestly executed with no other aim than the gratification of the artistic taste of the draughtsman, and resembles the free sketches thrown off by an artist in an idle hour.

Fig. 38.—The Mammoth, engraved on ivory.

But there is another point worthy of notice here, the interest of which is greatly increased by the undoubted antiquity of the relic. This palæographic tablet is a right-handed drawing; and the same may be affirmed of the group of reindeer, and of others of the Madelaine etchings. They are executed in profile, looking to the left, as any right-handed draughtsman naturally does, unless he has some special reason for deviating from the direction which the facility of his pencil suggests.

The question of right-handedness, as a natural or acquired practice peculiar to man, has a special interest when viewed in relation to his innate instincts or attributes in the remote dawn of human intelligence thus anew brought to light. The universality of right-handedness as a characteristic of man has been assumed, partly on the concurrent evidence of language, which shows the general habit of using one hand in preference to another. But the prevalence of the use of the right hand among savage nations is still a mere assumption. The statistics have yet to be collected, and are by no means readily accessible. Any evidence of the prevalence of right-handedness among a people still in the primitive stage of stone implements must be exceedingly vague. In the rude manipulations of a purely savage life, with the imperfection of the tools and the general absence of combined operations, the distinction in the use of one hand rather than the other is of little importance. In digging roots, climbing rocks or trees, in the rude operations of the primitive boat-maker or hut-builder, in hunting, flaying, cooking, or most other of the operations pertaining not only to the hunter, but even to the pastoral stage, there is little manifest motive for the use of one hand more than the other; and on the supposition of either becoming more generally serviceable, it would neither attract notice, nor interfere in any degree with the arts of life, though some gave a preference to the right hand, and others to the left. Hence the difficulty of determining the prevalence of right-handedness among savage nations. Its manifestations in the rude arts of the isolated workman are obscure, and any uniformity of action becomes apparent only in those combined operations which are comparatively rare in savage life. Yet even in the languages of the Hawaiians, Fijians, Maoris and Australians, terms are met with showing the preferential use of one hand. In the rudest state of society, man as a tool-using animal has this habit engendered in him; and as he progresses in civilisation, and improves on his first rude weapons and implements, there must arise an inevitable tendency to give the preference to one hand over the other, not only in combined action, but from the necessity of adapting certain tools to the hand.[^[45]]

An interesting episode relating to this assumed speciality of man is introduced in a communication by the Rev. W. Greenwell to the Ethnological Society of London, on the opening of some ancient Norfolk flint pits, popularly known as “Grime’s Graves.” In these were found not only implements of flint, a hatchet of basalt, hammers, stones of quartzite and other pebbles, and numerous clippings and cores of flint, along with a bone-pin, and another implement of bone which Mr. Greenwell supposes to have been used in detaching the flakes of flint for knives and arrow-heads; but also a number of primitive deer-horn picks, which had been used by the ancient quarrymen by whom the flint was thus procured, and fashioned into tools.

The picks made from the antlers of the red-deer were constructed simply by detaching the horn at a distance of about sixteen or seventeen inches from the brow end, and then breaking off all but the large brow-tine, with the help of fire and rude cutting implements of flint. They had been used both as picks and hammers, the point of the brow-tine serving for a pick, and the broad flat part opposite to it as a hammer for breaking off and detaching the flint from the chalk; while excavations through the solid chalk were effected by means of hatchets of basalt. The marks of both tools were abundant on the walls of the galleries; and many of the rude picks, including the two specially referred to, were coated with an incrustation of chalk, bearing the impress of the workmen’s fingers. Here, as in the Brixham cavern, an accident, which brought the ancient operations to an abrupt close, sealed up the evidence of them beyond reach of all obscuring interpolations, until their discovery in recent years. In clearing out one of the subterranean galleries excavated in the chalk, it was found that “the roof had given way about the middle of the gallery, and blocked up the whole width of it. On removing this, it was seen that the flint had been worked out in three places at the end, forming three hollows, extending beyond the chalk face of the end of the gallery.” In front of two of these hollows lay two picks, corresponding to others found in various parts of the shafts and galleries, made from the antler of the red-deer. But in this case the writer notes that the handle of each was laid towards the mouth of the gallery, the tines, which formed the blades of the tools, pointing towards each other, “showing, in all probability, that they had been used respectively by a right and a left-handed man. The day’s work over, the men had laid down each his tool, ready for the next day’s work; meanwhile the roof had fallen in, and the picks had never been recovered,” until their reproduction in evidence of the supposed habits of the right and left-handed workmen, by whom they were employed at the close of that last day’s labour, in the prehistoric dawn.[^[46]]

Fig. 39.—Scottish Stone Bracer.