CHAPTER I. The Stone Age: its Duration and its Place in Time.
CHAPTER I.
The Stone Age: its Duration and its Place in Time.
The nineteenth century, now nearing its close, has made an indelible impression upon the history of the world, and never were greater things accomplished with more marvellous rapidity. Every branch of science, without exception, has shared in this progress, and to it the daily accumulating information respecting different parts of the globe has greatly contributed. Regions, previously completely closed, have been, so to speak, simultaneously opened by the energy of explorers, who, like Livingstone, Stanley, and Nordenskiöld, have won immortal renown. In Africa, the Soudan, and the equatorial regions, where the sources of the Nile lie hidden; in Asia, the interior of Arabia, and the Hindoo Koosh or Pamir mountains, have been visited and explored. In America whole districts but yesterday inaccessible are now intersected by railways, whilst in the other hemisphere Australia and the islands of Polynesia have been colonized; new societies have rapidly sprung into being, and even the unmelting ice of the polar regions no longer checks the advance of the intrepid explorer. And all this is but a small portion of the work on which the present generation may justly pride itself.
Distant wars too have contributed in no small measure to the progress of science. To the victorious march of the French army we owe the discovery of new facts relative to the ancient history of Algeria; it was the advance of the English and Russian forces that revealed the secret of the mysterious lands in the heart of Asia, whence many scholars believe the European races to have first issued, and of this ever open book the French expedition to Tonquin may be considered at present one of the last pages.
Geographical knowledge does much to promote the progress of the kindred sciences. The work of Champollion, so brilliantly supplemented by the Vicomte de Rougé and Mariette Bey, has led to the accurate classification of the monuments of Egypt. The deciphering of the cuneiform inscriptions has given us the dates of the palaces of Nineveh and Babylon; the interpretation by savants of other inscriptions has made known to us those Hittites whose formidable power at one time extended as far as the Mediterranean, but whose name had until quite recently fallen into complete oblivion. The rock-hewn temples and the yet more strange dagobas of India now belong to science. Like the sacred monuments of Burmah and Cambodia they have been brought down to comparatively recent dates; and though the palaces of Yucatan and Peru still maintain their reserve, we are able to fix their dates approximately, and to show that long before their construction North America was inhabited by races, one of which, known as the Mound Builders, left behind them gigantic earthworks of many kinds, whilst another, known as the Cliff Dwellers, built for themselves houses on the face of all but inaccessible rocks.
Comparative philology has enabled us to trace back the genealogies of races, to determine their origin, and to follow their migrations. Burnouf has brought to light the ancient Zend language, Sir Henry Rawlinson and Oppert have by their magnificent works opened up new methods of research, Max Müller and Pictet in their turn by availing themselves of the most diverse materials have done much to make known to us the Aryan race, the great educator, if I may so speak, of modern nations.
To one great fact do all the most ancient epochs of history bear witness: one and all, they prove the existence in a yet more remote past of an already advanced civilization such as could only have been gradually attained to after long and arduous groping. Who were the inaugurators of this civilization? Who ware the earliest inhabitants of the earth? To what biological conditions were they subject? What were the physical and climatic conditions of the globe when they lived? By what flora and fauna were they surrounded? But science pushes her inquiry yet further. She desires to know the origin of tire human race, when, how, and why men first appeared upon the earth; for from whatever point of view he is considered, man must of necessity have had a beginning.
We are in fact face to face with most formidable problems, involving alike our past and future; problems it is hopeless to attempt to solve by human means or by the help of human intelligence alone, yet with which science can and ought to grapple, for they elevate the soul and strengthen the reasoning faculties. Whatever may be their final result, such studies are of enthralling interest. “Man,” said a learned member of the French Institute, “will ever be for man the grandest of all mysteries, the most absorbing of all objects of contemplation.”1
Let us work our way back through past centuries and study our remote ancestors on their first arrival upon earth; let us watch their early struggles for existence! We will deal with facts alone; we will accept no theories, and we must, alas, often fail to come to any conclusion, for the present state of prehistoric knowledge rarely admits of certainty. We must ever be ready to modify theories by the study of facts, and never forget that, in a science so little advanced, theories must of necessity be provisional and variable.
Truly strange is the starting-point of prehistoric science. It is with the aid of a few scarcely even rough-hewn flints, a few bones that it is difficult to classify, and a few rude stone monuments that we have to build up, it must be for our readers to say with what success, a past long prior to any written history, which has left no trace in the memory of man, and during which our globe would appeal to have been subject to conditions wholly unlike those of the present day.
The stones which will first claim our attention, some of them very skilfully cut and carefully polished, have been known for centuries. According to Suetonius, the Emperor Augustus possessed in his palace on the Palatine Hill a considerable collection of hatchets of different kinds of rock, nearly all of them found in the island of Capri, and which were to their royal owner the weapons of the heroes of mythology. Pliny tells of a thunder-bolt having fallen into a lake, in which eighty-nine of these wonderful stones were soon afterwards found.2 Prudentius represents ancient German warriors as wearing gleaming ceraunia on their helmets; in other countries similar stones ornamented the statues of the gods, and formed rays about their heads.3
A subject so calculated to fire the imagination has of course not been neglected by the poets. Claudian’s verses are well known:
Pyrenæisque sub antris
Ignea flumineæ legere ceraunia nymphæ.
Marbodius, Bishop of Rennes, in the eleventh century, sang of the thunder-stones in some Latin verses which have come down to us, and an old poet of the sixteenth century in his turn exclaimed, on seeing the strange bones around him
Le roc de Tarascon hébergea quelquefois
Les géants qui couroyent les montagnes de Foix,
Dont tant d’os successifs rendent le témoignage.
With these stones, in fact, were found numerous bones of great size, which had belonged to unknown creatures. Latin authors speak of similar bones found in Asia Minor, which they took to be those of giants of an extinct race. This belief was long maintained; in 1547 and again in 1667 fossil remains were found in the cave of San Ciro near Palermo; and Italian savants decided that they had belonged to men eighteen feet high. Guicciadunus speaks of the bones of huge elephants carefully preserved in the Hôtel de Ville at Antwerp as the bones of a giant named Donon, who lived 1300 years before the Christian era.
In days nearer our own the roost cultivated people accepted the remains of a gigantic batrachian4 as those of a man who had witnessed the flood, and it was the same with a tortoise found in Italy scarcely thirty years ago. Dr. Carl, in a work published at Frankfort5 in 1709, took up another theory, and, such was the general ignorance at the time, he used long arguments to prove that the fossil bones were the result neither of a freak of nature, nor of the action of a plastic force, and it was not until near the end of his life that the illustrious Camper could bring himself to admit the extinction of certain species, so totally against Divine revelation did such a phenomenon appear to him to be.
Prejudices were not, however, always so obstinate. For more than three centuries stones worked by the hand of man have been preserved in the Museum of the Vatican, and as long ago as the time of Clement VIII. his doctor, Mercati, declared these stones to have been the weapons of antediluvians who had been still ignorant of the use of metals.
During the early portion of the eighteenth century a pointed black flint, evidently the head of a spear, was found in London with the tooth of an elephant. It was described in the newspapers of the day, and placed in the British Museum.
In 1723 Antoine de Jussieu said, at a meeting of the Académie des Sciences, that these worked stones had been made where they were found, or brought from distant countries. He supported his arguments by an excellent example of the way in which savage races still polish stones, by rubbing them continuously together.
A few years later the members of the Académie des Inscriptions in their turn, took up the question, and Mahudel, one of its members, in presenting several stones, showed that they bad evidently been cut by the hand of man. “An examination of them,” he said, “affords a proof of the efforts of our earliest ancestors to provide for their wants, and to obtain the necessaries of life.” He added that after the re-peopling of the earth after the deluge, men were ignorant of the use of metals. Mahudel’s essay is illustrated by drawings, some of which we reproduce (Fig. 1), showing wedges, hammers, hatchets, and flint arrow-beads taken, he tells us, from various private collections.6
Bishop Lyttelton, writing in 1736, speaks of such weapons as having been made at a remote date by savages ignorant of the use of metals,7 and Sir W. Dugdale, an eminent antiquary of the seventeenth century, attributed to the ancient Britons some flint hatchets found in Warwickshire, and thinks they were made when these weapons alone were used.8
Figure 1.
Stone weapons described by Mahudel in 1734.
A communication made by Frère to the Royal Society of London deserves mention here with a few supplementary remarks.9
This distinguished man of science found at Hoxne, in Suffolk, about twelve feet below the surface of the soil, worked flints, which had evidently been the natural weapons of a people who had no knowledge of metals. With these flints were found some strange bones with the gigantic jaw of an animal then unknown. Frère adds that the number of chips of flint was so great that the workmen, ignorant of their scientific value, used them in road-making. Every thing pointed to the conclusion that Hoxne was the place where this primitive people manufactured the weapons and implements they used, so that as early as the end of last century a member of the Royal Society formulated the propositions,10 now fully accepted, that at a very remote epoch men used nothing but stone weapons and implements, and that side by side with these men lived huge animals unknown in historic times. These facts, strange as they appear to us, attracted no attention at the time. It would seem that special acumen is needed for every fresh discovery, and that until the time for that discovery comes, evidence remains unheeded and science is altogether blind to its significance.
But to resume our narrative. It is interesting to note the various phases through which the matter passed before the problem was solved. In 1819, M. Jouannet announced that he had found stone weapons near Périgord. In 1823, the Rev. Dr. Buckland published the “Reliquiæ Diluvianæ,” the value of which, though it is a work of undoubted merit, was greatly lessened by the preconceived ideas of its author. A few years later, Tournal announced his discoveries in the cave of Bize, near Narbonne, in which, mixed with human bones, he found the remains of various animals, some extinct, some still native to the district, together with worked flints and fragments of pottery. After this, Tournal maintained that man had been the contemporary of the animals the bones of which were mixed with the products of human industry.11 The results of the celebrated researches of Dr. Schmerling in the caves near Liège were published in 1833. He states his conclusions frankly: “The shape of the flints,” he says, “is so regular, that it is impossible to confound them with those found in the Chalk or in Tertiary strata. Reflection compels us to admit that these flints were worked by the hand of man, and that they may have been used as arrows or as knives.”12 Schmerling does not refer, though Lyell does, and that in terms of high admiration, to the courage required for the arduous work involved in the exploration of the caves referred to, or to the yet more serious obstacles the professor had to overcome in publishing conclusions opposed to the official science of the day.
In 1835, M. Joly, by his excavations in the Nabrigas cave, established the contemporaneity of man with the cave bear, and a little later M. Pomel announced his belief that plan had witnessed the last eruptions of the volcanoes of Auvergne.
In spite of these discoveries, and the eager discussions to which they led, the question of the antiquity of man and of his presence amongst the great Quaternary animals made but little progress, and it was reserved to a Frenchman, M. Boucher de Perthes, to compel the scientific world to accept the truth.
It was in 1826 that Boucher de Perthes first published his opinion; but it was not until 1816 and 1847 that he announced his discovery at Menchecourt, near Abbeville, and at Moulin-Quignon and Saint Acheul, in the alluvial deposits of the Somme, of flints shaped into the form of hatchets associated with the remains of extinct animals such as the mammoth, the cave lion, the Rhinoceros incisivus, the hippopotamus, and other animals whose presence in France is not alluded to either in history or tradition. The uniformity of shape, the marks of repeated chipping, and the sharp edges so noticeable in the greater number of these hatchets, cannot be sufficiently accounted for either by the action of water, or the rubbing against each other of the stones, still less ply the mechanical work of glaciers. We must therefore recognize in them the results of some deliberate action and of an intelligent will, such as is possessed by man, and by man alone. Professor Ramsay13 tells us that, after twenty years’ experience in examining stones in their natural condition and others fashioned by the hand of man, he has no hesitation in pronouncing the flints and hatchets of Amiens and Abbeville as decidedly works of art as the knives of Sheffield. The deposits in which they were found showed no sins of having been disturbed; so that we may confidently conclude that the men who worked these flints lived where the banks of the Somme now are, when these deposits were in course of being laid down, and that he was the contemporary of the animals whose bones lay side by side with the products of his industry.
This conclusion, which now appears so simple, was not accepted without difficulty. Boucher de Perthes defended his discoveries in books, in pamphlets, and in letters addressed to learned societies. He had the courage of his convictions, and the perseverance which insures success. For twenty years he contended patiently against the indifference of some, and the contempt of others. Everywhere the proofs he brought forward were rejected, without his being allowed the honor of a discussion or even of a hearing. The earliest converts to De Perthes’ conclusions met with similar attacks and with similar indifference. There is nothing to surprise us in this; it is human nature not to take readily to anything new, or to entertain ideas opposed to old established traditions. The most distinguished men find it difficult to break with the prejudices of their education and the yet more firmly established prejudices of the systems they have themselves built up. The words of the great French fabulist will never cease to be true:
Man is ice to truth;
But fire to lies.
One of the masters of modern science, Cuvier, has said14: “Everything tends to prove that the human race did not exist in the countries where the fossil bones were found at the time of the convulsions which buried those bones; but I will not therefore conclude that man did not exist at all before that epoch; he may have inherited certain districts of small extent whence he re-peopled the earth after these terrible events.” Cuvier’s disciples went beyond the doctrines of their master. He made certain reservations; they admitted none, and one of the most illustrious, Élie de Beaumont, rejected with scorn the possibility of the co-existence of man and the mammoth.15 Later, retracting an assertion of which perhaps he himself recognized the exaggeration, he contented himself with saying that the district where the flints and bones had been collected belonged to a recent period, and to the shifting deposits of the slopes contemporary with the peaty alluvium. He added—scientific passions are by no means the least intense, or the least deeply rooted—that the worked flints may have been of Roman origin, and that the deposits of Moulin-Quignon may have covered a Roman road! This might indeed have been the case in the Département du Nord, where a road laid down by the conquerors of Gaul has completely disappeared beneath deposits of peat, but it could not be true at Moulin-Quignon, where gravels form the culminating point of the ridge. Moreover, the laying down of the most ancient peats of the French valleys did not begin until the great watercourses had been replaced by the rivers of the present day; they never contain, relics of any species but such as are still extant; whereas it was with the remains of extinct mammals that the flints were found.
It was against powerful adversaries such as this that the modest savant of Abbeville had to maintain his opinion. “No one,” he says, “cared to verify the facts of the case, merely giving as a reason, that these facts were impossible.” Weight was added to his complaint by the refusal in England about the same blue to print a communication from the Society of Natural History of Torquay, which announced the discovery of flints worked by the hand of man, associated, as were those of the Somme, with the bones of extinct animals. The fact appeared altogether too incredible!
But the time when justice would be done was to come at last. Dr. Falconer visited first Amiens and then Abbeville, to examine the deposits and the flints and bones found in them. In January, 1859, and in 1860, other Englishmen of science followed his example; and excavations were made, under their direction, in the massive strata which rise, from the chalk forming their base, to a height of 108 feet above the level of the Somme. Their search was crowned with success, and they lost no blue in leaking known to the world the results they had obtained, and the convictions to which these results lead led.16 In 1859 Prestwich announced to the Royal Society of London that the flints found in the bed of the Somme were undoubtedly the work of the hand of plan, that they had been found in strata that lead not been disturbed, and that the men who cut these flints bad lived at a period prior to the time when our earth assumed its present configuration. Sir Charles Lyell, in his opening address at a session of the British Association, did not hesitate to support the conclusions of Prestwich. It was now the turn of Frenchmen of science to arrive at Abbeville. MM. Gaudry and Pouchet themselves extracted hatchets from the Quaternary deposits of the Somme.17 These facts were vouched for by the well-known authority, M. de Quatrefages, who had already constituted himself their advocate. All that was now needed was the test of a public discussion, and the meeting of the Anthropological Society of Paris supplied a suitable occasion. The question received long and searching scientific examination. All doubt was removed, and M. Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire was the mouth-piece of an immense majority of his colleagues, when he declared that the objections to the great antiquity of the human race had all melted away. The conversion of men so illustrious was followed of course by that of the general public, and, more fortunate than many another, Boucher de Perthes bad the satisfaction before his death of seeing a new branch of knowledge founded on his discoveries, attain to a just and durable popularity in the scientific world.
It must not, however, be supposed that popular superstition yielded at once to the decisions of science, and it is curious to meet with the same ideas in the most different climates, and in districts widely separated from each other:18 Everywhere worked flints are attributed to a supernatural origin; everywhere they are looked upon as amulets with the power of protecting their owner, his house or his flocks. Russian peasants believe them to be the arrows of thunder, and fathers transmit them to their children as precious heirlooms. The same belief is held in France, Ireland, and Scotland, in Scandinavia, and Hungary, as well as in Asia Minor, in Japan, China, and Burn lap; in Java, and amongst the people of the Bahama Islands, as amongst the negroes of the Soudan or those of the west coast of Africa,19 who look upon these stones as bolts launched from Heaven by Sango, the god of thunder; amongst the ancient inhabitants of Nicaragua as well as the Malays, who, however, still make similar implements.
The name given to these flints recalls the origin attributed to them. The Romans call them ceraunia from κεραυνός, thunder, and in the catalogue of the possessions of a noble Veronese published in 1656, we find them mentioned under this name.20 Every one knows Cymbeline’s funeral chant in Shakespeare’s play:
Fear no more the lightning flash
Nor the all dreaded thunder-stone.
In Germany we are shown Donner-Keile, in Alsace Dormer-Axt, in Holland Donner-Beitels, in Denmark Tordensteen, in Norway Tordenkeile, in Sweden Thorsoggar, Thor having been the god of thunder amongst northern nations; while with the Celts21 the Mengurun, in Asia Minor the Ylderim-tachi, in Japan the Rai-fu-seki-no-rui, in Roussillon the Pedrus de Lamp, and in Andalusia the Piedras de Rayo have the same signification. The inhabitants of the Mindanao islands call these stones the teeth of the thunder animal, and the Japanese the teeth of the thunder.22 In Cambodia, worked stones, celts, adzes, and gouges or knives, are known as thunder stones. A Chinese emperor, who lived in the eighth century of our era, received from a Buddhist priest some valuable presents which the donors said had been sent by the Lord of Heaven, amongst which were two flint hatchets called loui-kong, or stones of the god of thunder. In Brazil we meet with the same idea in the name of corsico, or lightnings, given to worked flints; whilst in Italy, by all exception almost unique, they are called lingue san Paolo.
May we not also attribute to the worship of stones some of the religious and funeral rites of antiquity? According to Porphyry, Pythagoras, on his arrival on the island of Crete, was purified with thunder-stones by the dactyl priests of Mount Ida. The Etruscans wore flint arrow-heads on their collars. They were sought after by the Magi, and the Indians gave them an honored place in their temples. According to Herodotus, the Arabs sealed their engagements by making an incision in their hands with a sharp stone; in Egypt the body of a corpse before being embalmed was opened with a flint knife; a similar implement was used by the Hebrews for the rite of circumcision; and it was also with cut stones that the priests of Cybele inflicted self-mutilation in memory of that of Atys. At Rome the stone hatchet was dedicated to Jupiter Latialis, and solemn treaties were ratified by the sacrifice of a pig, the throat of which was cut with a sharp flint. According to Virgil, this custom was handed down to the ancient Romans by the uncouth nation of the Equicoles. At the beginning of the Christian era., the heroes commemorated by Ossian still had in the centre of their shields a polished stone consecrated by the Druids, and a saga maintains that the ceraunia assured certain victory to their owners. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Aztecs used obsidian blades for the sacrifices, in which hundreds of human victims perished miserably; and similar blades are used by the Guanches of Teneriffe to open the bodies of their chiefs after death. At the present day, the Albanian Palikares use pointed flints to cut the flesh off the shoulder-blade of a sheep with a view to seeking in its fibres the secrets of the future, and when the god Gimawong visits his temple of Labode, on the western coast of Africa, his worshippers offer him a bull slain with a stone knife. Lumholtz,23 in the second of his recent explorations in Queensland, tells us that the natives still use stone weapons, varying in form and in the handles used, and that the weapons of the Australians living near Darling River, as well as those of the Tasmanians, are without handles.
During the first centuries of the Christian era, strange rites were still performed in honor of dolmens and menhirs. The councils of the Church condemned them, and the emperors and kings supported by their authority the decrees of the ecclesiastics.24 Childebert in 554, Carloman in 742, Charlemagne by an edict issued at Aix-la-Chapelle in 789,25 forbid their subjects to practise these rites borrowed from heathenism. But popes and emperors are alike powerless in this direction, and one generation transmits its traditions and superstitions to another. In the seventeenth century a Protestant missionary called in the aid of the secular arm to destroy a superstition deeply rooted in the minds of his people; in England, sorcerers were proceeded against for having used flint arrow-heads in their pretended witchcraft; in Sweden, a polished hatchet yeas placed in the bed of women in the pangs of labor; in Burmah, thunder-stones reduced to powder were looked upon as an infallible cure for ophthalmia; and the Canaches have a collection of stones with a special superstition connected with each. But why seek examples so far away and in a past so remote? In our own day anti in our own land we find men who think themselves invulnerable and their cattle safe if they are fortunate enough to possess a polished flint.
Prehistoric times are generally divided into three epochs—the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. We owe this classification to the archæologists of Northern Europe.26 It is neither very exact nor very satisfactory, and fresh discoveries daily tend to unsettle it.27 Alsberg maintained that iron was the first metal used, founding his contention on the scarcity of tin, the difficulty of obtaining alloys, and on the sixty-one iron foundries of Switzerland which may date from prehistoric times. The rarity of the discovery of iron objects, he urged, is accounted for by the ease with which such objects are destroyed by rust. There has never been a Bronze or an Iron age in America, so that it would seem very doubtful whether all races went through the same cycles of development. I myself prefer the division into the Palæolithic period, when men only used roughly chipped stones, and the Neolithic period, when they carefully polished their stone weapons. “There may,” says Alexander Bertrand,28 “be one immutable law for the succession of strata throughout the entire crust of the earth, but there is no corresponding law applicable to human agglomerations or to the succession of the strata of civilization. It would be a very grave error to adopt the theory according to which all human races have passed through the same phases of development and have gone through the same complete series of social conditions.”
Figure 2.
Copper hatchets found in Hungary, and now in the National Museum of Budapest.
It may perhaps be convenient to introduce a fourth period when copper alone was used and our ancestors were still ignorant of the alloys necessary for the production of bronze. Hesiod speaks of a third generation of men as possessing copper only, and although it does not do to attach undue importance to isolated facts, recent discoveries in the Cevennes, in Spain, in Hungary, and elsewhere, appear to confirm the existence of an age of copper (Fig. 2). We may add that the mounds of North America contain none but copper implements and ornaments, witnesses of a time when that metal alone was known either on the shores of the Atlantic or of the Pacific29 (Fig. 3).
Figure 3.
Copper beads, from Connett’s Mound, Ohio (natural size).
It is impossible to fix the duration of the Stone age. It began with man, it lasted for countless centuries, and we find it still prevailing amongst certain races who set their faces against all progress. The scenes sculptured upon Egyptian monuments dating from the ancient Empire represent the employment of stone weapons, and their use was continued throughout the time of the Lagidæ and even into that of the Roman domination. A few years ago, on the shores of the Nile, I saw some of the common people shave their heads with stone razors, and the Bedouins of Gournah using spears headed with pointed flints. The Ethiopians in the suite of Xerxes had none but stone weapons, and yet their civilization was several centuries older than that of the Persians. The excavations on the site of Alesia yielded many stone weapons, the glorious relics of the soldiers of Vercingetorix. At Mount Beuvray, on the site of Bibracte, flint hatchets and weapons have been discovered associated with Gallic coins. At Rome, M. de Rossi collected similar objects mixed with the Æs rude. Flint hatchets are mentioned in the life of St. Éloy, written by St. Owen, and the Merovingian tombs have yielded hundreds of small cut flints, the last offerings to the dead. William of Poitiers tells us that the English used stone weapons at the battle of Hastings in 1066, and the Scots led by Wallace did the same as late as 1288. Not until many centuries after the beginning of the Christian era did the Sarmatians know the use of metals; and in the fourteenth century we find a race, probably of African origin, making their hatchets, knives, and arrows of stone, and tipping their javelins with horn. The Japanese, moreover, used stone weapons and implements until the ninth and even the tenth century A.D.
But there is no need to go back to the past for examples. The Mexicans of the present day use obsidian hatchets, as their fathers did before them; the Esquimaux use nephritis and jade weapons with Remington rifles. Nordenskiöld tells us that the Tchoutchis know of no weapons but those made of stone; that they show their artistic feeling in engravings on bone, very similar to those found in the caves of the south of France. In 1854, the Mqhavi, an Indian tribe of the Rio Colorado (California), possessed no metal objects; and it is the same with the dwellers on the banks of the Shingle River (Brazil), the Oyacoulets of French Guiana, and many other wandering and savage races. Père Pelitot tells us that the natives living on the banks of the Mackenzie River are still in the stone age; and Schumacker has given an interesting example of the manufacture of stone weapons by the Klamath Indians dwelling on the shores of the Pacific. It has been justly said: “The Stone age is not a fixed period in time, but one phase of the development of the human race, the duration of which varies according to the environment and the race.”30
In thus limiting our idea of the stone age, we may conclude that alike in Europe and in America,31 there has been a period when metal was entirely unknown, when stones were the sole weapons, the sole tools of man, when the cave, for which he had to dispute possession with bears and other beasts of prey, was his sole and precarious refuge, and when clumsy heaps of stones served alike as temples for the worship of his gods and sepulchral monuments in honor of his chiefs.
Excavations in every department of France have yielded thousands of worked flints, and there are few more interesting studies than an examination of the mural map in the Saint Germain Museum on which are marked with scrupulous exactitude the dwelling-places of our most remote ancestors, and the megalithic monuments which are the indestructible memorials of our forefathers.
In the Crimea were picked up a number of small flints cut into the shape of a crescent exactly like those found in the Indies and in Tunis, and the Anthropological Society of Moscow has introduced us to a Stone age the memory of which is preserved in the tumuli of Russia. On the shores of Lake Lagoda have been found some implements of argillaceous schist, in Carelia and in Finland tools made of slate and schist, often adorned with clumsy figures of men or of animals. The rigor of the climate did not check the development of the human race; in the most remote times Lapland, Nordland, the most northerly districts of Scandinavia, and even the bitterly cold Iceland, were peopled. The Exhibition of Paris, 1878, contained some stone weapons found on the shores of the White Sea.
On several parts of the coast of Denmark we meet with mounds of an elliptical shape and about nine feet high, with a hollow in the centre, marking the site of a prehistoric dwelling. It was not until about 1850 that the true nature of these mounds was determined. Excavations in them have brought to light knives, hatchets, all manner of stone, horn, and bone implements, fragments of pottery, charred wood, with the bones of mammals and birds, the skeletons of fishes, the shells of oysters and cockles buried beneath the ashes of ancient hearths. To these accumulations the characteristic name of Kitchenmiddings, or kitchen refuse, has been given.
Several caves have recently been examined in Poland, one of which, situated near Cracow, appears to belong to Palæolithic times. Count Zawiska has already given an account of his interesting discoveries to the Prehistoric Congress at Stockholm. In the Wirzchow cave he identified seven different hearths, and took out of the accumulations of cinders various amulets, clumsy representations of fish cut in ivory, split bones, bears’, wolves’, and elks’ teeth pierced with a hole for threading, and more than four thousand stone objects of a similar type to those found in Russia, Scandinavia, and Germany. We meet with similar traces of successive habitation in a cave near Ojcow; the valuable contents of which included some beautiful flint tools, some awls, bone spatulæ, and some gold ornaments, mixed, in the lower of the hearths, with the bones of extinct animals, and in the upper, with those of species still living.
The discoveries made in the Atter See and in the Salzburg lakes with those in the Moravian caves prove what had previously been very stoutly denied, the existence in those districts of ancient races at a very remote date.
The most ancient inhabitants of Hungary, however, cannot be traced further back than to Neolithic times. In that country have been found, with polished stone implements, thousands of objects made of stag-horn, or bone, almost all without exception finely finished off. The discovery of copper tools and ornaments of a peculiar form in the Danubian provinces, bears witness to a distinct civilization in those districts, and confirms what we have just said about a Copper age.
From the Lake Stations of Austria and Hungary, we pass naturally to those of Switzerland. We shall have to introduce to our readers whole villages built in the midst of the waters, and a people long completely forgotten. In many of these stations, none but stone implements have been found, and on the half-burnt piles on which the huts had been set up, it is still easy to make out the notches cut with flint hatchets.
We meet with similar pile dwellings, as these structures are called, in France, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and England, for from the earliest times man was constantly engaged in sanguinary contests with his fellowmen, and sought in the midst of the waters a refuge from the ever present dangers surrounding him.
The discoveries made in Belgium must be ranked amongst the most important in Europe, and we shall often have occasion to refer to them. Holland, on the other hand, having much of it been under the sea for so long, yields nothing to our researches but a few arrow-heads, hatchets, and knives made of quartz or diorite, and all of them of the coarsest workmanship.
No less fruitful in results to prehistoric science are the researches made in the south of Europe. The congress that met at Bologna, in 1871, showed us that in the Transalpine provinces man was witness of those physical phenomena which gave to Italy its present configuration; and the exhibition in connection with the congress enabled us to get a good idea of the primitive industry which has left relics behind it in every district of the peninsula.
Some hatchets of a similar type to the most ancient found in France were dug out of a gravel pit at San Isidro on the borders of the Mançanarès, associated with the bones of a huge elephant that has long been extinct; and a cave has recently been discovered near Madrid from which were dug out nearly five hundred skeletons, the greater number thickly coated with stalagmite. Near the bodies lay several flint weapons, and some fragments of pottery.32 Cartailhac tells us of similar discoveries in various parts of Portugal.33 The caves of Santander have yielded worked bones and barbed harpoons; and those of Castile, various objects resembling those of the Reindeer period of France. It is, however, an interesting and important fact that the reindeer never crossed the Pyrenees. Although so far excavations have been anything but complete, we are already able to assert that during Palæolithic times the ancient Iberia was occupied by races whose industrial development was similar to that of modern Europe.
It will be well to mention also the excavations made on the slopes of Mount Hymettus, and in the ever-famous plains of Marathon. Finlay has brought together in Greece a very interesting collection of stone weapons and implements which he picked up in great numbers at the base of the Acropolis of Athens. All these discoveries prove the existence of man at a time about which but yesterday nothing was known, and to which it is difficult as yet to give a name, this existence being proved by the most irrefragable of evidence, the work of his own hands.
Although the proofs of there having been a Stone age in Western Europe are absolutely convincing, it is difficult to feel equally sure with regard to the portions of the globe where so many districts are closed to the explorer. Everywhere, however, where excavations have been made, they have yielded the most remarkable results. M. de Ujfalvy has brought diorite and serpentine hatchets and wedges from the south of Siberia, and Count Ouvaroff tells us of a Quaternary deposit, the only one known at present at Irkutsk, in Eastern Siberia, containing cut flints. Near Tobolsk, Poliaskoff found some beautifully worked stones. Other archæologists tell us of having found, in the east of the Ural Mountains and on the shores of the Joswa, hammers, hatchets, pestles, nuclei the shape of polygonal prisms, and round or long pieces of flint, all pierced with a central hole, which are supposed to have been spindle whorls. Lastly, Klementz tells us that the lofty valleys of the Yenesei and its tributaries were inhabited in the most remote times by races who developed a special civilization.
At the other extremity of the great Asiatic continent, a deposit of cinders found at the entrance of a cave near the Nahr el Kelb yielded some flint knives or scrapers, and more recently a prehistoric station has been made out at Hanoweh, a little village of Lebanon, east of Tyre. The flints are of primitive shapes, not unlike the most ancient forms found in France. They were discovered in a mass of débris of all kinds, forming a very hard conglomerate. Some teeth, which had belonged to animals of the bovidæ, cervidæ, and equidæ groups, were got out with considerable difficulty, but the bones in the conglomerate were too touch broken up to be identified. Worked flints and arrow- or spear-heads were also found in considerable quantities in various parts of the table-land of Sinai, and at the openings of the caves in which the ancient inhabitants took refuge. It was with stone tools that these people worked the mines riddling the sides of the mountains, and it is still easy to make out traces of their operations.
We have already alluded to Japan; for a long time the barbarian Aïnos, the earliest inhabitants of the country, were acquainted with nothing but stone. Flint arrows were presented to the Emperor Wu-Wang eleven hundred years before our era; the annals of one of the ancient dynasties speak of flint weapons, and an encyclopædia published in the reign of the Emperor Kang-Hi speaks of rock hatchets, some black and some green, and all alike dating from the most remote antiquity.
Agates worked by the hand of man are found in great quantities in the bone beds of the Godavery. Some javelin heads in sandstone, basalt, and quartz, with scrapers and knives, most of them flat on one side and rounded on the other, appear to be even more ancient than the agate implements. Some of the celts resemble those of European type, others the flint weapons found in Egypt, and the clumsiest forms may be compared to those still in use amongst the natives of Australia. We may also mention a somewhat rare type lately discovered in the island of Melas, which have been characterized as saw-bladed knives. A letter from Rivett-Carnac announces the discovery of weapons and stone implements in Banda, a wild mountain district on the northwest of India. The scrapers, he says, strangely resemble those of the Esquimaux, and the arrow-heads those of the most ancient inhabitants of America.34
Many megalithic monuments are met with in places widely removed from each other in the vast Indian Empire. Captain Congreve, after describing the cairns with their rows of stones ranged in circles, the kistvaens or dolmens, the huge rocks placed erect as at Stonehenge, the barrows hollowed out of the cliffs, declares with undisguised astonishment that there is not a Druidical monument of which he had not seen the counterpart in the Neilgherry Mountains.35
General Faidherbe divides Africa into two distinct regions—one north of the Great Desert, where the inhabitants and the fauna and flora have all alike certain characteristics in common with those of Europe; and the other south of the Sahara, which was at one time separated from that in the north by a vast inland sea. In this southern region we are in Nigritia, or the Africa of the negroes, where the inhabitants in their physical characteristics and in their language, the mammals, and the plants, differ altogether from those of the north. In one point, however, these two regions resemble each other: in both we recognize a Stone age, which existed in Algeria and in Egypt, as well as on the banks of the Senegal and at the Cape of Good Hope. The valley of the Nile from Cairo to Assouan has yielded a series of objects in flint, porphyry, and hornblendic rock, retaining traces of human workmanship, and reminding us of similar implements of European type. These objects,36 says M. Arcelin, are always found either beneath modern deposits or at the surface of the upper plateaux at the highest point to which the river rises; nothing has, however, been found in the alluvial deposits of the Nile, in spite of the most persevering search. At the Prehistoric Congress held at Stockholm, some worked flints were produced that had been found in the Libyan Desert. This once inhabited district, now without water or vegetation, can only be reached at the present day with the greatest difficulty. Is not this yet another proof of the great changes which have taken place since the advent of man? Lastly, the Boulak Museum contains a whole series of stone weapons and implements, showing in their workmanship a progressive development similar to that we find in Europe. Many archæologists are of opinion that the worked flints found in the plains of Lower Egypt date from Neolithic times. Those alone are Paleolithic which have been found in a deposit hard enough for the hollowing out of tombs, which are certainly earlier than the eighteenth dynasty. We must add, however, that neither with the Palæolithic nor with the Neolithic relics have been found any bones of extinct animals. Some savants go yet further: they think that these worked stones are but chips split off by the heat of the sun.37 A phenomenon of this kind is mentioned by Desor and Escher de la Linth in the Sahara Desert; Fraas quotes a similar observation made by Livingstone in the heart of Africa, and one by Wetzstein, who, not far from Damascus; saw hard basalt rocks split under the influence of the early morning freshness. I have myself noticed similar phenomena in the Nile valley, but it must be added that the fragments of rock broken off by the combined influence of heat and humidity present very notable differences to those worked by the hand of man, and cannot really be mistaken for them.
In Algeria have been preserved some most interesting relics of prehistoric times. If I am not mistaken, Worsaae was the first to note the worked stones in the French possessions in Africa. They have been picked up in great numbers, especially near the watercourses at which the ancient inhabitants of the country slaked their thirst, as do their descendants at the present day. The exploration of the Sahara daily yields unexpected discoveries; and already fifteen different stations formerly inhabited by man have been made out. In those remote days a large river flowed near Wargla, which was then an important centre, and a number of tools picked up bear witness to the former presence of an active and industrious population. At one place the flint implements, arrow-heads, knives, and scrapers are all of a very primitive type, and were found sorted into piles. This was evidently a dépôt, probably forming the reserve stock of the tribe. Wargla or perhaps Golea at one time appears to have been the extreme limit of the Stone age in Algeria, but quite recently traces of primitive man have been discovered amongst the Tuaregs. These relics are hatchets made of black rock, and arrow-heads not unlike those which the Arabs attribute to the Djinn; but as we approach the south we find the flints picked up more clumsily and unskilfully cut—a proof that they were the work of a more barbarous people with less practical skill. It is the megalithic monuments of Algeria, of which we shall speak more in detail presently, that are the most worthy of attention. As in India, we meet with them in thousands, and in certain parts of the continent they extend for considerable distances. They consist of long, square, circular, or oval enclosures—dolmens similar to those of Western Europe,—and almost always surrounded by circles of upright stones. The silence of historians respecting them need not make us doubt their extreme antiquity, for did it not take a very long time to induce the scientific men of our day to turn their attention to Algeria at all?
The exploration of Tunisia has enabled us to study the Stone age in that district, and a few years ago it was announced that nearly three thousand objects of different types had been found in thirteen different localities.38 My son found near Gabes an immense number of small worked flints not unlike a human nail, the origin and use of which no one has been able to determine. The association of weapons and implements roughly finished off, with chips and stones still in the natural state, bears witness to the existence at one time of workshops of some importance. The recent discoveries of Collignon correspond with those in Algeria, and complete our knowledge of the basin of the Mediterranean.
In the Cave of Hercules, in Morocco, which Pomponius Mela spoke of as of great antiquity in his day, have been found a great many worked flints, such as knives and arrow-heads. We shall refer later to the important monument of Mzora and the menhirs surrounding it, the builders of which certainly belonged to a race that lived much nearer our own day than did the inhabitants of the Cave of Hercules.
The south of Africa is not so well known as the north, and the difficulty of making explorations is a great obstacle to progress. For some centuries, however, polished stone hatchets from the extreme south of the continent have been preserved in the museums of Leyden and Copenhagen, under the name of thunderstones, or stones of God. A great many are found in British South Africa, especially at Graham’s Town and Table Bay.39 Gooch, after describing the physical configuration of the Cape, says that stone implements are found in all the terraces at whatever level of the Quaternary deposits. With these stone objects were found a good many fragments of coarse hand-made pottery, that had been merely baked in the sun, and was strengthened with good-sized pieces of quartz. Similar peculiarities are noticed in ancient European pottery. We shall have to refer again to these singular analogies, one of the chief aims of this book being to bring them into notice.
In the torrid regions between the Vaal and the Zambezi rivers, we find traces of a race of a civilization different from that of the savages conquered by the English. At Natal the gradual progress of these unknown people can be traced step by step. To the earliest period of all belong nothing but roughly hewn flints, and no traces of pottery have been found; then follow flint arrow-heads of more distinct form, and here and there fragments of sun-dried pottery. Of more recent date still are polished stone weapons and more finely moulded pottery; whilst to the latest date of all belong weapons of considerable variety of form, better adapted to the needs of man, and with these weapons were found huge stone mortars which had been used for crushing grain, and bear witness to the use of vegetable diet.
We also meet with important ruins in the Transvaal. Some walls are still standing which are thirty feet high and ten thick, forming imperishable memorials of the past. They are built of huge blocks of granite piled up without cement. We know nothing of those who erected them; their name and history are alike effaced from the memory of man, and we know nothing either of their ancestors or of their descendants.
In the Antipodes certain curious discoveries point to the existence of man in those remote and mysterious times, to which, for want of a better, we give in Europe the name of the Age of the Mammoth and the Reindeer; and everything points to the conclusion that man appeared in the different divisions of the earth about the same time. Probably the first appearance of our race in Australia was prior to the last convulsions of nature which gave to that continent its present configuration. “Scientific studies,” says M. Blanchard,40 “lead us to believe that at one period a vast continent rose from the Pacific Ocean, which continent was broken up, and to a great extent submerged, in convulsions of nature. New Zealand and the neighboring islands are relics of this great land.”
In the Corrio Mountains in New Zealand, at a height of nearly 4,921 feet above the sea-level, have been found flints shaped by the hand of man, associated with a number of bones of the Dinornis, the largest known bird. Other facts bear witness to an extinct civilization, which we believe to have been extremely ancient, but to which, in the present state of our knowledge, it is impossible to assign a date. In the island of Tonga-Taboo, one of the Friendly group, is a remarkable megalith, the base of which rests on uprights thirty feet high, and supports a colossal stone bowl which is no less than thirteen feet in diameter by one in height. In the same island is a trilithon consisting of a transverse bar resting on two pillars provided with mortises for its reception. The pillars weigh sixty-five tons, and a local tradition affirms that the coralline conglomerate out of which they were hewn was brought from Wallis Island, more than a thousand miles off. It is difficult to explain41 how the makers of this trilithon managed to transport, to work, and to place such masses in position. In a neighboring island a circle of uplifted stones, covering an area of several hundred yards, reminds us of the cromlechs of Brittany. The so-called Burial-Mound of Oberea at Otaheite, if it really was constructed with stone tools, is yet more curious. Imagine a pyramid of which the base is a long square, two hundred and sixty feet long by eighty-seven wide. It is forty-three feet high. The top is reached by a flight of steps cut in the coralline rock, all these steps being of the same size and perfectly squared and polished.42
Figure 4.
Stone statues on Easter Island.
On a rock at the entrance to the port of Sydney a kangaroo is sculptured. In Easter Island (Rapa-Nui) La Pérouse discovered a number of coarsely executed bust statues (Fig. 4). There are altogether some four hundred of them, forming groups in different parts of the island. The excavations conducted by Pinart in 1887 have proved these figures to be sepulchral monuments. He managed to make a considerable collection of crania and human bones. Round about the crater of the Rana-Raraku volcano, forty of these figures have been counted, all of a similar type, all cut in one piece of solid trachyte rock. In another place are eighty busts with longer noses and thicker lips, forming a group by themselves. The largest of them is some thirty-nine feet high. On the sides of the volcano, scattered about amongst the statues, have been picked up a considerable number of knives, scrapers, and pointed pieces of obsidian, which were probably tools thrown away by the sculptors of the figures.
These monuments and sculptures are certainly the work of a race very different from the present natives, who are altogether incapable of producing anything of the kind, and who retain absolutely no traditions respecting their predecessors. This complete oblivion, which may appear rather strange, is by no means rare amongst savage races, and Sir John Lubbock cites a great many very curious examples. “Oral traditions,” says Broca, “are changed and distorted by each succeeding generation; and are at last effaced to give place to others as transitory, and thus the most important events are, sooner or later, relegated to oblivion.”43
We have dwelt at considerable length in another volume44 on the earliest inhabitants of America. Much still remains unknown in spite of the considerable and important work done of late years. The very name of the New World seems to be altogether out of place, America being as old, if not older, than any continent of the Eastern Hemisphere. Lund has brought forward weighty reasons for his theory that the central plateau of Brazil was already a country when the rest of the continent was still submerged or at least represented merely by a few small islets. This theory, however, even if it could be absolutely proved, would not help us to fix the date of the earliest presence of man in America, still less to say by what route he arrived there.
Figure 5.
Fort Hill, Ohio.
Certain facts, amongst which I would, in the first place, quote the discoveries of Dr. Abbott in the alluvial deposits of the Delaware and those recently announced in Nevada,45 prove the contemporaneity of men like ourselves with the great edentate and pachydermatous mammals, which were the most characteristic creatures of the American fauna. The prehistoric inhabitants of North America were familiar with the mastodon, those of South America with the glyptodon, the shell of which on occasion served as a roof to the dwelling of primeval reran, which dwelling was often but a den hollowed out of the ground. As in Europe, the early inhabitants of America had to contend with powerful mammals and fierce carnivora; and in the West as in the East man made up in intelligence for his lack of brute force, and however formidable an animal might be, it was condemned to submit to, or disappear before, its master. In course of time Sedentary replaced Nomad races; shell heaps, some of marine, some of riverine and lacustrine species, but all alike mixed with a great variety of rubbish, were gradually piled up extending for many miles and covering many acres of ground, bearing witness to the existence of a population already considerable.
Figure 6.
Group of sepulchral mounds.
In other parts of America prehistoric races have left behind them huge earthworks, lofty masses which were probably fortifications (Fig. 5), temples, and sepulchral monuments (Fig. 6). These earthworks extend throughout North America from the Alleghany Mountains to the Atlantic, from the great lakes of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The name of the people who erected them is lost, and we must be content with that of Mound Builders, which commemorate their vast undertakings.
Figure 7.
Ground plan of a pueblo of the Mac-Elmo Valley.
At a period probably nearer our own, Arizona and New Mexico were occupied by other maces, who built the so-called pueblos, which were regular phalansteries, or communal dwellings, each member of the tribe having to be content with one wretched little cell (Fig. 7). At some distance from the men of the pueblos lived the Cliff Dwellers, about whom we know next to nothing; a few stone weapons and countless fragments of pottery being all they have left behind them. These men established themselves in situations which are now inaccessible, hewing out a dwelling in the rocks on the mountains (Figs. 8 and 9) with wonderful perseverance, and closing up the approaches with adobes or sun-dried bricks, making incredible efforts to obtain for their families what must have been at the best but a precarious shelter.46 These prehistoric races were succeeded in America by the Toltecs, Aztecs, Chibcas, and Peruvians, all known in history, though their origin is as much involved in obscurity as that of their predecessors. Temples, palaces, and magnificent monuments tell of the wealth which gold gives, a wealth, alas, which also enervated the vital forces, so that the Spanish and Portuguese met with but little serious resistance in their rapid conquests.
Figure 8.
Cliff-house on the Rio Mancos.
Figure 9.
House in a rock of the Montezuma Cañon.
Such are the facts with which we have to deal. In the following chapters we shall consider more at length the problems they present, but already we are led to one important conclusion: in every part of the globe, in every latitude, in every climate, worked flints, whether but roughly chipped or elaborately polished, present analogies which must strike the most superficial observer. “We find them,” remarks an American author, “in the tumuli of Siberia, in the tombs of Egypt, in the soil of Greece, beneath the rude monuments of Scandinavia; but whether they come front Europe or Asia, from Africa or America, they are so much alike in form, in material, and in workmanship, that they might easily be taken for the work of the same men.”
At a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1871, Sir John Lubbock showed worked flints from Chili and New Zealand with others found in England, Germany, Spain, Australia, the Guianas, and on the banks of the Amazon; which one and all belonged to the same type. More recently the Anthropological Society of Vienna compared the stone hatchets found near the Canadian lakes and in the deserts of Uruguay, with others from Catania in Italy, Angermünde in Brandenburg, and a tomb in Scandinavia, deciding that they were all exactly alike. Lastly, those who studied at the French Exhibition of 1878 the hatchets, hammers, and scrapers, the bone implements, pottery, and weapons brought from different places, the inhabitants of which had no communication with each other, could not fail to notice in their turn how impossible it was to distinguish between them. “So evident is this resemblance,” says Vogt,47 “that we may easily confound together implements brought from such very different sources.”
The same observation applies to megalithic monuments. Everywhere we find these primitive structures assuming similar forms. It is difficult enough to believe that the wants of man alone, such as the craving for food, the need of clothing, and the necessity of defending himself, have led in every case to the same ideas and the same amount of progress. Even if this be proved by the worked flints, we cannot accept a similar conclusion with regard to the megalithic monuments, which imply reflection and a thought of the future far beyond the material needs of daily life. Is it not more reasonable to regard a similitude so striking as a proof of the unity of our race?
The human bones discovered are yet more convincing testimony. Excavations have yielded some which may date from the very earliest period of the existence of man upon the earth. They have been found in caves and in the river drift, beneath the mounds of America and the megalithic monuments of Europe, in the ice-clad districts of Scandinavia and of Iceland, and in the burning deserts of Africa, but not one of them owes its existence to men of a type different from those of historic times or of our own day.48 MM. Quatrefages and Hamy in their magnificent work “Crania Ethnica,” have been able to distinguish prehistoric races and indicate the area they occupied. These races are still represented, and their descendants of to-day retain the characteristics of their ancestors.
One final conclusion is no less interesting. These absolutely countless flints, these monuments of imposing size, these stones of immense weight often brought from afar, these marvellous mounds and tumuli, bear witness to the presence of a population which was already considerable at the time of which we are endeavoring to make out the traces. A long series of centuries must have been needed for a people to increase to such an extent as to have spread over entire continents. And time was not wanting. Whatever antiquity may be attributed to the human race, whatever the initial date to which its first appearance may be relegated, this antiquity is but slight, this date is but modern, if we compare it with the truly incalculable ages of which geology reveals the existence. At every turn we are arrested by the immensity of time, the immensity of space, and yet our knowledge is still confined to the mere outer rind of the earth, and science cannot as yet even guess at the secrets hidden beneath that rind.
In concluding these introductory remarks, we must add that very great difficulties await those who devote themselves to prehistoric studies—difficulties such as noise but those who have attempted to conquer them can realize. The rare traces of prehistoric man must be sought amongst the effects of the cataclysms that have devastated the earth, and the ruins piled up in the course of ages. We must show mall wrestling with the ever-recurrent difficulties of his hard life, and gradually developing in accordance with a law which appears to be immutable. Such is the aim of this work, and it is with gratitude that we assert at the beginning that the pianta uomo, the human plant, as Alfieri calls our race, was endowed by the Creator from the first with a very vigorous vitality, to enable it to contend with the dangers besetting its steps in the early days of its existence, and with a truly marvellous spirit, to be able to make so humble a beginning the starting-point for a destiny so glorious.
1 M. Gaston.
2 Pliny calls them ceraunia gemma (“Natural History,” book ii., ch. 59 book xxxvii., ch. 51).
3 S. Reinach proves clearly enough that the collections of the Emperor Augustus were from Capri.
4 This skeleton was discovered in 1726 by Scheuchzer, a doctor of Œningen, and by him placed in the Leyden Museum, with the pompous inscription Homo diluvii testis (Philosophical Transactions, vol. xxxiv.). Cuvier, by scraping away the stone, revealed the true nature of the fossil.
5 “Ossium Fossilium Docimasia.”
6 “Mém. Acad. des Inscriptions,” 1734, vol. x., p. 163.
7 Archæologia, vol. ii., p. 118.
8 “The Antiquities of Warwickshire,” vol. iv., 1656.
9 Archæologia, vol. xiii., p. 105.
10 Castelfranco: Revue d’Anthropologie, 1887.
11 Annales des Sciences Naturelles, vol. xvii., p. 607. Cartailhac: Matériaux, 1884.
12 “Recherches sur les Ossements Fossiles de la Province de Liège.”
13 Athenæum, 16 July, 1859.
14 “Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe,” third edition, p. 13, Paris, Didot, 1861.
15 Acad. des Sciences, 18th and 23d May, 1863.
16 Lubbock: “On the Evidence of the Antiquity of Man Afforded by the Physical Structure of the Somme Valley” (Nat. Hist. Review, vol. ii.). Prestwich: “On the Occurrence of Flint Implements Associated with the Remains of Extinct Species in Beds of a Late Geological Period” (Phil. Trans., 1860). Evans: “Flint Implements in the Drift” (Arch., 1860–62).
17 Acad. des Sciences, 1859, 1863.
18 Cartailhac: “L’Age de Pierre dans les Souvenirs et les Superstitions Populaires.”
19 A short time before his tragic end, the noble and patriotic Gordon sent to Cairo three hatchets or stone wedges found amongst the Niams-Niams, who said they had fallen from Heaven, and who worshipped then with superstitious rites (Bull. Institut Égyptien, 1886, No. 14).
20 “Museo Moscardo,” Padova, 1656.
21 According to M. Pitre de Lisle, the Bretons think that these stones vibrate at every clap of thunder.
22 Roulin: Acad. des Sciences, December 28, 1868.
23 “Congrès d’Anthropologie et d’Archéologie Préhistorique,” Paris, 1889.
24 Council of Arles in 452, of Tours in 567, of Nantes in 658, of Toledo in 681 and 692, and of Leptis in 743.
25 Baluze: “Capitularia Regum Francorum,” vol. i., pp. 518, 1231, 1237.
26 Steenstrup, Forchammer, Thomsen, Worsaae, and Nillsson. The commission appointed by the Copenhagen Academy of Sciences presented six reports on the subject between 1850 and 1856.
27 “Die Anfang des Eisens Cultur,” Berlin, 1886.
28 “Archéologie Celtique et Gauloise,” p. 46.
29 Dr. Much: “L’Age de Cuivre en Europe et son Rapport avec la Civilisation des Indo-Germains,” Vienna, 1886. Pulsky: “Die Küpfer Zeit im Ungarn,” Budapest, 1884. Cartailhac: “Ages Prehistoriques de l’Espagne et du Portugal,” p. 211. E. Chantre: Mat., June, 1887; and Berthelot: Journal des Savants, September, 1889.
30 Irenée Cochut: “Thèse presentée à la Faculté de Théologie Protestante de Montauban.”
31 See my translation of the author’s admirable and exhaustive work on “Prehistoric America,” chapters i. and iv.—Nancy Bell.
32 Académie des Sciences, May 23, 1881; “Antiquités du Musée de Minoussink,” Tomsk, 1886–7.
33 “Les Âges Préhistoriques en Espagne et en Portugal.”
34 “Stone Implements from the Northwestern Provinces of India,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1883.
35 Literary Journal of Madras, vol. xiv.
36 “L’Âge de Pierre et la Classification Préhistorique d’après les Sources Égyptiennes,” Paris, 1879.
37 Pitt Rivers: “On the Discovery of Chert Implements in the Nile Valley,” British Association, York, 1881.
38 Belluci: “L’Eta della Pietra in Tunisia,” Roma, 1876, Bol. della Soc. Geog. Italiana, 1876.
39 “The Stone Age of South Africa,” Journ. Anth. Institute, 1881.
40 Revue des Deux-Mondes, march 1, 1878.
41 De Quatrefages: Rev. d’Ethnographie, 1883, p. 97, etc.
42 Sir J. Lubbock: “Prehistoric Times,” pp. 483, 549.
43 Ass. française, le Havre, 1877. Discours d’Ouverture.
44 “Prehistoric America,” Paris, New York, and London.
45 See my translation of “L’Amérique Préhistorique,” chap. i., “Man and the Mastodon.”—Nancy Bell.
46 Many interesting details respecting the Cliff Dwellers are given in De Nadaillac’s “L’Amérique Préhistorique,” chap. v.—Nancy Bell.
47 Congrès des Naturalistes Allemands, Innsbruck, Sept., 1869,
48 “Quaternary man is always man in every acceptation of the word. In every case in which the bones collected have enabled us to judge, he has ever been found to have the hand and foot proper to our species, and that double curvature of the spinal column has been made out, so characteristic that Serres made it the distinctive attribute of his human kingdom. In every case with him, as with us, the skull is more fully developed than the face. In the Neanderthal skull so often quoted as bestial, the cranial capacity is more than double that ever found in the largest gorilla.” De Quatrefages: “Hommes Fossiles et Hommes Sauvages,” p. 60.